


Knockout

by girlbookwrm



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: (both of which will very likely be undone at some future date because of who i am as a person), Buff Peggy Fic, F/F, Friends to Lovers, Minor Character Death, Natasha Romanov Needs a Hug, POV Natasha Romanov, Past Character Death, Peggy Carter Needs a Hug, Peggy Carter as Captain America, Pining, Slow Burn, Sparring, eventually, except they don't call her that because that wouldn't make a lick of sense, it's hugging for emotionally stunted people, kind of, more like workplace proximity associates to lovers, they're gonna hug each other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-31
Updated: 2019-06-09
Packaged: 2020-03-26 14:42:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 33,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19007893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/girlbookwrm/pseuds/girlbookwrm
Summary: The Captain’s hair is in perfect rolls and her lips are just as red as the propaganda posters promised. But the posters definitely did not fully capture the experience of being in the presence of a 6’2” woman who can absolutely bench press a Harley.Natasha wants to pick a fight.





	1. Boxer's Handshake

**Author's Note:**

  * For [esaael](https://archiveofourown.org/users/esaael/gifts).



> WELCOME TO OUR RBB 2019, AKA BUFF PEGGY FIC
> 
> Incoyable art by [esaael](https://archiveofourown.org/users/esaael/pseuds/esaael) (the art arrives in Chapter 4)
> 
> Brilliant Betaing by [gracelesso](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gracelesso/pseuds/gracelesso), [tajargirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tajargirl/pseuds/tajargirl), and of course the Gal Pal
> 
> Also a quick shoutout to [padmedala](url) for being the head cheerleader from the very beginning, and everyone else on tumblr who has been so supportive and sent me so much Excellent Buff Peggy Content. Y'all are my Heroes.

 

 

 

Natasha doesn’t have any useful memories of her time at the Red Room, just nightmares.

That’s deliberate, of course. It’s something they did to her, which doesn’t make it better. Makes it worse, probably. But it’s always been like this. She knows her mind wasn’t always her own.

She can’t remember any of their faces. If she thinks about it — _really_ thinks about it — it’s as if she never looked at them. She remembers them the way she imagines normal people remember everyone else in a train car: those people you’re not supposed to look at. But she knows she did.

She knows because she has so many crystalline perfect memories, like bits of broken china. The delicate design is still clean and flawless, but incomplete. Shards and fragments taken out of context, jumbled up, incoherent, half of them probably forgeries. Even an eidetic memory can tell lies.

For example, she remembers the Bolshoi very clearly, vividly remembers the boy who played Spartacus, dancing in his chains. He had the most beautiful blue eyes. She’s sure. She’s maybe 40% sure his eyes were blue. She remembers dancing too, her hands crossed at her back. Just another slave in the corps. She remembers the practice room, the barre. She remembers bitching about Moiseyev’s choreography with the other dancers, even though she’s 80% sure that she couldn’t have been in the Bolshoi, and 100% sure she wasn’t in the Bolshoi in _1958,_ at least twenty years before she was even born.

She remembers a cold room. Like a morgue, or maybe a laboratory. She remembers a body, frost-touched blue and laid out on a slab. She can’t remember the face, but she knows it. She knows it better than her own. She remembers a blurry handler standing behind her. _Black Widow,_ the handler calls her, and laughter bounces off the walls. She doesn’t remember being married, but she can’t shake the bone-deep sense that the name is _right,_ for some reason. It feels right.

She remembers the Ivanovich assassination pretty clearly, and that one she thinks is probably real. She remembers that they were trying to make it look like a mugging gone wrong. They hadn’t expected the girl to be there. Natasha can’t remember her partner’s face for that job, can’t even remember how tall he was, but she remembers hauling Ivanovich’s daughter away down the alley. The daughter wasn’t part of the mission, killing her would only have drawn more attention. Natasha remembers covering the girl’s eyes and ears so she couldn’t see, wouldn’t hear what they were about to do to her papa. The girl couldn’t have been more than eleven.

Natasha remembers being about eleven years old herself: wrists raw, trying not to shiver from the damp and the cold, studying Western propaganda with Madame B, whose face is an uncertain blur. She remembers a big stack of comics; Superman. Wonder Woman. Lady Liberty and the Howling Commandos. She remembers reading them with a kind of clinical detachment and noting that Lady Liberty had terrible form. That punch wouldn’t have knocked out a toddler and it certainly wouldn’t have knocked out Hitler. Punches as drawn by someone who’d never thrown a punch in their life. Westerners were so _soft._

 

* * *

 

It isn’t until after she leaves the Red Room, after she spends a year in the cold trying to stumblingly become a person—

Truthfully? It isn’t until after she meets Clint Barton that she understands how softness can be weaponized without being insincere. She’s weaponized her own softness before, of course. Luring a mark in with a show of vulnerability, until you know exactly where to slip the knife.

That’s not the way Clint does it. He’s got one of those goofy, squashy faces and he broadcasts his feelings with it like he’s a damn traffic light. Which is why he’s the kind of spy who watches through a scope instead of getting in close.

But instead of taking Nat out from a distance with an arrow she’d have never seen coming or even thought to guard against, he _does_ get in close, and makes a pitch instead of taking the shot. And because he’s soft, with a soft face and a soft Westerner’s heart, she knows it isn’t a trick. She knows she can trust him when he says “SHIELD can help you,” and it turns out that’s the most dangerous thing of all.

While she’s deprogramming in a secure SHIELD-run recovery facility, Clint visits her every Friday, and introduces her to the finer points of Western culture: Dog Cops, and really terrible coffee, and the intricacies of comic book collecting. He even brings her his hard-backed copy of the Nomad Saga, where Lady Liberty rebrands herself first as Miss Union Jack, then as Nomad when she uncovers corruption in MI-13, and finally as just Captain Margaret Elizabeth Carter, standing on the Cliffs of Dover and looking out across the Channel, ready to face the future without her mask.

It’s not the first time that Natasha has felt like a fictional character. Not like _Lady Liberty,_ but _like a fictional character._ Because to her at least, it’s blatantly transparent that Margaret Carter isn’t real, and the whole Nomad storyline is just a morality play with tits and spandex. Lady Liberty has about as much agency as the Black Widow did.

“Well when you put it like that,” Clint says, scratching his chin. “I guess I didn’t pick up the finer points when I was fifteen.”

When Natasha was fifteen, she went on her first assignment. She’s pretty sure she was fifteen. But she also remembers that the year was 1952, so that can’t be right.

 

* * *

 

In 2006, Natasha is released from SHIELD’s containment and rehabilitation facility. A woman who calls herself Maria Hill says: “There’s a place for you at SHIELD, if you want it.”

“As an assassin?” Natasha says, completely expressionless.

Maria doesn’t flinch. “As whatever you want to be.”

“What I want,” Natasha says, a little lazily, putting on a smirk that doesn’t belong to her. “Well, I’d want some answers before I committed to anything.”

“I’ll answer any questions I can.”

Natasha watches Maria with alley-cat wariness, and Maria meets every probing question, every delicately laid verbal trap with steadiness like bedrock. Maria with her hair pulled back so tight and her stance wide and her head cocked; she looks unshaken, unshakable.

At the end of their meeting, Natasha says, “I’ll think about it.”

After Maria leaves, Natasha locks herself in the bathroom of her temporary apartment, because it’s the only place she can really relax, and spends the usual ten minutes looking at herself in the mirror. She’s got this persistent fear that she’s going to forget her own face the way she’s forgotten the faces of everyone she worked with in the Red Room.

This is the thing about deprogramming. The Red Room took so much from her — memories, opinions, family — but for every single thing they took, they gave her something else: how to manipulate, to kill a man, to cover it all up. She may have left the Red Room of her own accord, but she still carried them around inside her. So much of her was programming, and now that it’s broken...

She stares into the mirror and thinks: _Where else can you go?_ Nowhere. _Who else would take you in?_ No one you trust. _What else can you be used for?_ Nothing good.

She looks into her own eyes and thinks: _what kind of a person are you?_

There was the part of her that was Them, and had all kinds of things to say. And then, eventually, there was the part of her that was Her, which was much smaller, and only knew how to say _no._ No, I won’t do that anymore. No, I don’t have to do what you tell me. No, I am not yours.

_What kind of a person is that?_

Not much of a person. Natasha frowns. She’s not the sort to be kind to herself, to lie about something like that, but that’s not quite right.

Not much of a person, _yet._

Unlike Clint’s comic book characters, she gets the chance to be real, if she wants to be. Unlike Captain Carter, she gets to choose what mask to wear, or not.

 

* * *

 

If Natasha were more of a person, she might develop a crush on Maria Hill, but she hasn’t decided what that would feel like to Natasha Romanoff, so instead she just likes Maria.

It’s for the best, probably. Maria is part of her intake team and in charge of familiarizing her with SHIELD’s protocols, so Natasha humiliates herself in front of Agent Hill about twenty times a day in those early weeks.

Natasha gets to be the recipient of several MariaTalks™, including such gems as:

> **1.** The very emphatic speech detailing why elimination is _not_ the fallback protocol for SHIELD when things go awry.
> 
> **2.** A much more patient explanation about how you can’t just bribe the admins to do your paperwork. Bribing is not just “against the rules” in theory, it’s against the rules in _reality,_ and that policy is strictly enforced.
> 
> **3.** If you want to try out the experimental and potentially deadly weapons, you have to get permission and do so in a controlled environment.
> 
> **4.** No, you don’t need to swear undying loyalty to anyone, not even as a formality. You do need to sign a contract though, and you will have to start paying taxes.  
>  **4a.** No, you cannot swear undying loyalty _instead_ of signing a contract and paying taxes.
> 
> **5.** You do get time off. Paid time off even.  
>  **5a.** Taking time off is not actually optional, you’re not allowed to sleep at the office.

The coup de grace is the very embarrassing moment during her first official SHIELD facility tour where she cocks her head at the memorial in front of her, squints hard, and says: “Why do you have a comic book character on your Wall of Valor?”

Which is how she learns that Lady Liberty isn’t just a statue and a piece of propaganda. This is also how she learns that Agent Hill is, underneath her cool and collected exterior, a bubbling fangirl and passionate history nerd.

 

* * *

 

In 2008, while Natasha is laid up with a bullet hole in her abdomen, reading ghost stories, Tony Stark declares himself Iron Man.

 

* * *

 

In 2010, Natalie Rushman is hired as Tony Stark’s newest PA. It’s her least favorite job for SHIELD so far, including the one where she took a bullet to the gut. Iron Man might be a hero, but Tony Stark is a brat, constitutionally incapable of realizing that he is not, in fact, the center of the universe. If only they could get Pepper Potts to put on the suit instead.

It’s not like it’s _surprising_ that Stark has issues. Before taking the assignment, Natasha had read up on all the relevant Starks, and Captain Carter’s name had come up again, this time in the context of a theoretical romantic tie between her and Stark the elder. Howard famously never stopped looking for her body after she went down in the Valkyrie. He helped make SHIELD what it is, and it doesn’t take a genius to look at that ridiculous acronym and Lady Liberty’s ridiculous so-called “weapon” and draw a line between the two.

And then, in the seventies, they revived the Lady Liberty comics and introduced a new character: Reynard Clark, the lovable inventor who builds Captain Carter’s weapons and steals her heart. The comic revival did well enough to get a really terrible movie adaptation, and sparked a swirl of hindsight speculation and a flurry of tabloid attention on Howard and Maria Stark.

Articles were written, along with a couple of trashy exposés with dubious sourcing. But the hypothesized divorce never materialized, and anyway, Natasha is more focused on how that story had clearly affected young Tony’s psyche, since he’d “transferred from” (Natasha reads “gotten kicked out of”) the first of what turned out to be a string of private schools six months later.

It’s useful intel, and she makes sure to wear retro red lipstick to throw him off his game.

It works. It doesn’t stop Stark from being a completely insufferable pain in the ass, but it works.

 

* * *

 

In 2011, SHIELD finds the wreckage of the Valkyrie. Natasha isn’t very interested, except for the effect it has on Maria. Maria geeks out about it in a gently repressed way, like she’s trying very hard not to vibrate at a frequency that will shatter glass.

Natasha, by this point, feels about Maria the way she imagines normal people feel about their siblings. Fond. A little embarrassed. Tolerant of their weirdnesses. And it is undeniably _funny_ to watch Maria flip effortlessly back and forth between that calm, confident exterior she projects and the squealing, hands-flapping fangirl.

Normally Natasha would be doing the dead-eyed lizard stare she uses on junior operatives who get all gushy about Iron Man and the Avengers Initiative. But it’s _Maria._ She’s the one who convinced Natasha to join the Avengers Initiative in the first place. When Maria talks about superheroes, it’s with the warmth and sincerity of a true believer. Coming from someone else, it’s just corny, but Maria’s a natural born skeptic, like Fury. When they believe, that _means_ something.

“It’s just— it’s a piece of _history,_ Nat!” Maria says, clenching her fists and shaking them in front of her. “A piece of history!”

“A piece of history that you have a deeply weird history ladycrush on,” Natasha says, smug and smirking.

Maria goes red to the tips of her ears, which Natasha has never seen before. She throws back her head and laughs, thumping her palm on the table between them and Maria buries her nose in her beer glass and changes the topic.

It isn’t until several months later that Natasha learns that they didn’t just find the Valkyrie. They didn’t just find Carter’s body. They found Carter herself, still alive.

 

* * *

 

In Natasha's defense, she has about twelve other things on her mind when she finally actually meets the real Lady Liberty. At least three of the things are Loki, of course. One is definitely Fury, who is acting even shiftier than usual. Another is Bruce, because one does not simply let The Hulk slip your mind.

Six of the things are Clint, or Clint-adjacent. Clint, who’s out there somewhere, who’s been _brainwashed_ by a _Norse god._ So that’s at _least_ six things on her mind right there.

(And one is lunch, because she hasn't eaten since they left Mumbai and she's _starving.)_

The point is that she has a lot on her mind. She was bound to miss something. So she doesn't notice right away.

The quinjet has already touched down when Natasha steps out onto the deck of the helicarrier. The jet's back hatch is opening, and Hill comes out into the sunlight.

Hill straightens up as she steps off the ramp, and looks back over her shoulder, waiting for someone to follow her. She’s standing even taller than usual, like she's got someone to impress.

Boy howdy does she ever.

The Captain’s hair is in perfect rolls and her lips are just as red as the propaganda posters promised. But the posters definitely did not fully capture the experience of being in the presence of a 6’2” woman who can absolutely bench press a Harley.

Natasha wants to pick a fight.

The urge arrives in her gut as a series of angry, red, Russian expletives and a sound like sirens. Natasha is used to this kind of thing — you get used to that kind of thing, when your mind wasn’t always your own. And as a consequence, Natasha is not now, nor has she ever been, the kind of person who gives in to her impulses.

 _Assessment,_ demands the nameless, faceless Red Room trainer that still lives in Natasha's head, even after all this time.

The Captain — _Lady Liberty herself_ — looks like she’s about to go on vacation to Southern California, circa 1948. She’s got those wide-legged, high waisted pants with the sailor-style double row of buttons at the front, and a loose white blouse tucked into them. She’s wearing dark glasses with a thick red rim that matches her lipstick. All that’s missing is a wide brimmed hat to top her victory rolls.

This is a choice, Natasha surmises as she crosses the tarmac. The cold and calculating half of her brain is sure of this much: Captain Carter may be a product of the 40s, but she’s not an idiot. She knows how to fit in. She doesn’t _have_ to dress like she’s just stepped out of the past, she’s _choosing_ to do that.

What Natasha doesn’t know yet is _why._ What is she trying to say? Is she trying to set herself apart because she wants people to remember who she is? Then why not the uniform? Nothing says “Don’t Forget I’m A Superhero” like the iconic red-white-and-blue, after all.

“Agent Romanoff,” Maria says, and the Captain turns, mahogany curls sliding over her shoulders. “Meet Captain Margaret Carter.”

 

* * *

 

“So?” Maria asks in an undertone, in a quiet moment while the Captain and Fury are talking on the other side of the bridge. “What do you think of her?”

Natasha doesn’t need to ask which her. She glances over and lets her eyes rake over Carter again. “I didn’t know she was British,” she says at last. The accent had been the only real surprise; Lady Liberty never spoke in the propaganda films.

“And?” Maria prompts, going a little handler-y.

“Do you want my assessment of her potential as an agent or a hero or something else?” Natasha says, because she doesn’t have to give the assessment if she doesn’t want to, and sometimes it’s fun to push back. She quirks an eyebrow. “I think your girlfriend is _very nice,_ but—”

 _“Nat,”_ Maria says. “Come on.”

“Ugh, fine.” She cocks her head in Carter’s direction and contemplates their earlier conversation. _Ma’am,_ Carter had said. A firm handshake, calloused hands. And later: _Only word I care about,_ she’d said to Bruce, dutifully, like a line from a script she’d memorized. The clothes, her attentiveness to Fury, her reactions all scroll before Natasha’s memory like a briefing. _Assessment._ “I think she’ll do what we need her to do.”

“Huh,” Maria says, like she hadn’t thought of it that way. “What do we need her to do, though?”

Natasha is still staring at the Captain. She’s a little… stuck on the waistband of those trousers. There’s something about the way she wears them. It’s niggling at her. “Assemble the Avengers,” she says, a little vaguely. “What else is there?” she adds. A little black humor, because if they need to assemble the Avengers everything else that can possibly go wrong already has. Natasha shrugs one shoulder. “We know she’s got the tactical know-how. She’s a proven leader, but she understands the chain of command, so you don’t have to worry about her going off the rails. Stark will be the sticking point. If she can get him to follow her lead, we’re golden.”

“Hm,” Maria says.

Even with twelve other things on her mind, Natasha notices a tone there. She gives Maria a sidelong look. “Why? What do _you_ think of her?”

Maria shakes her head slowly. “I think…” She narrows her eyes. “I think I’m worried about her.”

Natasha startles. “Really? Why?”

Maria gives her a look. “Well. Actually, if anyone will get it, it’s _you.”_

Which makes _no_ sense to Natasha, but—

“We got a hit!” one of the techs calls. “A 67% match. Wait. Cross match, 79%.”

“Location?” Maria says, coming around to look at the screen. Natasha joins her, and sure enough there he is, looking more like a dapper but understated fashion model than a Norse God.

“Stuttgart,” the tech says.

“Captain.”

That’s Fury’s voice. Natasha follows his gaze back to the Captain, looking over her shoulder with her hands on her hips. Her jaw is set. She looks ready to take on the world.

“You’re up.”

Carter sighs, nods, and lets her hands drop from her waist. A stray thought crosses Natasha’s mind. _She wears those clothes the same way I dream in Russian._ But she can’t quite pin down what that _means._

Much later, it will finally occur to Natasha that there is another reason to dress like someone from your own past: when you’re stranded in the future, the familiar is hard to come by. Even when you’re looking in a mirror.

 

 

 

 

 


	2. Round One

 

 

 

In the pilot’s seat next to Natasha, Maria is vibrating with excitement, in her minimalist way. Someone other than Natasha probably wouldn’t notice. Natasha figures it makes sense: Maria got to see her hero in action, who wouldn’t be excited about that? Probably the only way it could’ve been better was if Carter had actually worn the Lady Liberty uniform Maria designed. But the Captain had gently demurred, suggesting they go for something a little less conspicuous. Maria hadn’t pushed. 

Not that there was much  _ inconspicuous _ about a tall but otherwise apparently unremarkable SHIELD agent in riot gear _ carrying Lady Liberty’s shield _ and holding her own against a _god_ in a helmet with _three foot gold horns._

But that was just Natasha’s opinion.

And then, of course, all efforts to be inconspicuous were completely negated by the arrival of Tony fucking Stark.

“I don’t like this,” Carter murmurs in that crisp British accent. 

Maria looks over at Natasha, and Natasha quirks an eyebrow back. They’re pretty good at the whole  _ silent communication _ thing. Clint might be the one who brought her in to SHIELD, but Maria is the one who brought her on board. Maria is the one who convinced her she could be an Avenger. She’s always Natasha’s favorite handler to have when things go to shit.

“Don’t like what, Cap?” Stark butts in, because of course he does. “Being in a plane so soon after your little accident?”

Maria tenses, and Natasha twists to look over her shoulder. This is something to watch. Carter is a walking talking rage button for Stark, tapped deeply into about 60% of his latent issues, and it’s not like he was overly polite and delicate to begin with.

Carter’s stony expression doesn’t move an inch. “I distinctly remember telling Fury we didn’t need you on this one.”

Stark folds his arms with a dull clank. “Well Fury’s not my mom.” He looks over at Carter and Natasha watches him smirk in profile. “And neither are you,” he adds, in an ostentatiously flirty voice. “I mean. It’s not my usual thing, but I could be into cougars.”

Natasha, for one, isn’t surprised that Stark would push like this. He’s been in competition with his father for years, this is nothing new. Although she’s interested to see if Carter will ignore it, or get flustered, or give a lecture.

Instead, Carter smiles, slow. Red lipstick, Natasha notes with irritation. Also not inconspicuous. “Oh, you really are your father’s son,” she drawls, condescension in every syllable.

Natasha’s a little surprised that Carter would go for Stark’s throat like that. She would be impressed, but she also doesn’t want to give Carter the credit. Could’ve been a shot in the—

Lightning splits the dark sky outside and the quinjet rattles. Maria adjusts her grip on the controls and shoots a glance at Natasha, who quickly looks back to their radar. She hadn’t seen anything there a minute ago, but sure enough, it’s like there’s turbulence forming up around them.

“Where’s this coming from?” she mutters.

Carter’s black gloved hand grips Maria’s seat and she looks over at the weather report. Her red lips purse and a moment later she looks back to the cargo bay, and their prisoner. “Don’t suppose you’d know anything about this?”

“Don’t look at me.” Loki’s voice sets the hairs on the back of Natasha’s neck up.  _ “I’m _ not the God of Thunder.”

And then the whole jet lurches with a  _ thunk,  _ and it’s all hands on deck to keep them in the sky. Carter lurches sideways. The next thing Natasha knows, the back hatch is  _ fucking opening _ and gosh isn’t it lucky they’re flying nice and low to stay under the radar?

“Stark, you  _ moron,” _ Carter shouts. Because of course Stark’s the one who opened the hatch.

Natasha risks a glance back in time to see Stark come flying at her, crashing to the floor behind her pilot’s seat, thrown by a blow from a—

_ Well,  _ Natasha thinks.  _ That can only be Thor.  _ She understands why Clint was impressed.

Thor, blonde hair flying in the wind and hammer held in one hand, rips Loki out of his seat, through the seatbelts, one handed, and then throws them both out the back of the quinjet and — yep — flies away by the grace of his magic hammer.

Natasha hates her job. A lot.

“Another Asgardian?” Maria yells, still keeping both hands on the controls to keep the quinjet as steady as possible.

“On whose side?” Carter shouts.

“Does it matter?” Stark says. His tone has shifted, even through the suit’s modulator: all business now. He’s clomping towards the open hatch. 

Carter’s on her feet again. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“Out!” Stark barks, and launches out the door, boot jets and repulsors coming to life.

Carter swears, low but audible over the rushing wind, and when Natasha turns, she’s wrestling her way into a parachute. 

“I’d sit this one out if I were you,” Natasha says. “These guys come from legend. They’re basically gods.”

“I’ve never punched a god in the face,” Carter says, pulling the strap tight across her chest.  She sighs a little, and smiles brightly, all red lips and white teeth and brown eyes hard as steel. “But I’ve always wanted to try.”

And then she throws herself out the back, shield first.

Maria and Natasha exchange concerned looks. 

“The standard SHIELD gear really isn’t designed to go up against Asgardians,” Maria whispers, looking a little mortified.

 

* * *

 

By the time Natasha and Hill have circled around to land, a full acre of woodland has been flattened and Carter’s uniform is indeed in tatters. All three gods and man have fallen in behind Captain Carter. That’s a trick Natasha would  _ very much _ like to learn, but she suspectes it has to do with being Lady Liberty. 

Thor and Loki take seats in the quinjet. Loki is sitting with Thor’s hammer firmly in his lap, pinning him down. Thor is glaring at him from the seats directly across, not even blinking as far as Natasha can tell. Tony flies escort in his battered suit. Natasha suspects it’s to protect his wounded pride.

Meanwhile, Captain Carter strips the scorched and lightning-struck armor off. The uniform underneath is full of holes and reeks of smoke, but she doesn’t seem hurt. Or at least, not badly enough to miss a step.

“Um,” Hill says. “The Cap uniform is more... durable, I promise.”

“I look forward to seeing what you’ve done with it,” Carter says, but something in the set of her shoulders suggests that’s a lie.

Natasha keeps her mouth shut and wonders. Why is Carter so reluctant to put on the uniform? She doesn’t seem to mind taking charge, and wearing the uniform can only make that easier. Maybe this is what Maria meant when she said she was worried. Natasha makes a mental note to ask her about that, soon.

Carter sighs through her teeth. “Call ahead to Fury,” she orders. “Set up a debrief meeting for all of us; the whole initiative. Thor too, since he’s here. We need his intel. I’ll need my clothes back.” She plucks at the collar of her torn jumpsuit. “And we’ll need an interrogator,” she adds. “Someone to talk to—” she jerks her chin, back at the cargo area, at Loki.

Natasha’s eyes flick back to the god — demigod, trickster, whatever. He’s sneering at Thor, calm despite the hammer in his lap. Like he’s in charge. Like this is all part of his plan.

“I have a feeling,” Carter says lightly. “That he’s not going to be an easy nut to crack. We’ll need someone willing to do whatever it takes.”

Natasha looks back ahead. She’s a little surprised that Carter’s so blase about the probability of torture on the horizon, but the Captain is fresh from a war zone, after all. 

The Helicarrier should be coming up soon, probably just beyond the next cloudbank. There’s a cell waiting there, one that should be plenty strong enough to hold even a god. And as for an interrogator, someone ready and able to get intel out of  _ an actual god... _

Natasha thinks of her best friend out there somewhere, following orders against his will, and feels a cold determination creeping up her spine. What would she be willing to do to Loki? What  _ wouldn’t _ she be willing to do. She would cheerfully take Loki to pieces. Slowly.  _ Creatively. _ It would be her genuine pleasure, but what good would it do?

She’s just as willing to take herself to pieces, and then use those pieces like scalpels so sharp and so fine Loki won’t even feel them carving out the information she needs. 

“Yeah, that won’t be a problem,” Natasha says.

 

* * *

 

Afterwards, Natasha’s jogging through the helicarrier, hurrying from her interrogation to the labs. SHIELD employees scatter before her: even not wearing her Widow gear, she is a known, respected, and feared figure among her fellow SHIELD operatives. She and Clint —

_ This is a child at prayer _ echoes in her skull, but she puts it aside. She can’t afford distractions. Banner is the objective, not Loki, not Clint. Securing the Hulk is the most important thing now that she knows what Loki’s after. Move and countermove.

_ Pathetic, _ hisses the Loki in the back of her mind. 

She ignores it as she turns a corner and sees Thor’s unmistakably large shoulders ahead of her. She briefly wonders whether he found his way there without help or—

“Well, it’s just good to know the world hasn’t changed while I was asleep.”

—but the sound of Lady Liberty’s crisp outrage wouldn’t be hard to follow even if he  _ didn’t _ already know where to find Banner and Stark. She slips in behind him and the Red Room instructor in her mind demands an assessment. All the so-called Avengers, circled up around Nick Fury like vultures, and Nick as always, standing his ground, completely unintimidated by them. Natasha is barely in the door when she finds herself face to face with Bruce Banner’s outrage too.

“Did you know about this?” he asks.

Natasha braces herself a little. She and Bruce have the beginnings of an understanding, and have since the moment she stopped lying to him. They’re both angry, and they recognize that in each other.

“You want to think about removing yourself from this environment, doctor?” she advises.

He laughs, bitter. “I was in Calcutta, I was pretty well removed.”

“Loki is manipulating us all,” she says, looking from him to Stark and Carter and Thor, trying bringing the rest of the group in on her side.

“And you aren’t manipulating us?” the Captain says. 

Natasha can’t help responding with a withering look. So much for de-escalation. She might have expected Lady Liberty to be a unifying force rather than an antagonizing one, but apparently she was wrong.

Carter’s back in her on-vacation-in-1948 outfit. She looks nearly as put-together as she had when Natasha first saw her; the only differences are her low ponytail and the blood on her knuckles. Angry as Natasha is, angry as Bruce is, the Captain is angrier. She jabs one finger at the screen. It shows a warhead with a Tesseract-powered payload. “I want to know why SHIELD is making weapons of mass destruction with HYDRA science.”

“So do I,” Bruce demands an answer like punctuation. 

Natasha looks to Fury. Fury’s jaw works, then he breathes through his nose and points to Thor. “Because of him.” 

Thor, standing off to the side with his arms folded, blinks and puts a hand to his chest. “Me?”

Fury opens his mouth to explain, but—

“New Mexico?” Carter cuts through like a bullet hot from the barrel. “Nonsense,” she declares, and Fury stares with his mouth open. “You think I don’t know a fig leaf when I see it?”

Thor frowns, looking around the room like it’ll answer him. “...fig leaf?”

“New Mexico?” Stark pipes up. It has been a few minutes since he stuck his nose where it wasn’t wanted.

The Captain gives him a look but doesn’t give up command of the room. “What, didn’t you do the reading?” She looks back to Fury. “You think I can’t see what SHIELD’s game is? This isn’t about New Mexico. It isn’t about Asgardians or Chitauri. This is about control. Controlling people—”

“Who can’t be matched,” Fury shoots back. “Who represent a threat to the entire world. That’s the reality of the situation. We are hilariously outgunned, Captain. Aliens, and individuals who—”

_ “Are people,” _ Carter says, leaning in, one hand on her waist. It’s a hell of a thing to watch Nicholas J. Fury getting yelled at by someone who looks like she’s about to go put rivets in a B-29. “Individuals who are people. I don’t know who you think you’re fooling. I was a spy long before I was a captain—” Natasha hadn’t known that; she really needs to talk to Maria, now that Carter is more than a historical artifact “—I’m not naïve and I’m not  _ blind. _ These people are not assets to be controlled, like you ‘controlled’ the Tesseract. They are  _ people.” _

“People we need to be prepared to fight, in order to protect  _ other people _ ,” Fury says, undaunted. “I’m not in the business of control, I’m in the business of protection.”

The Captain scoffs. “Protection? How Al Capone of you,” she says, condescension in every line of her. “Scarface is apt, I suppose.”

Natasha lets her arms drop from where they’re crossed over her chest. That seems like a step too far. A personal attack doesn’t seem like something Lady Liberty would stoop to. Natasha knew that Loki was messing with them, but now she  _ really knows. _

“Say hello to my little friend,” Tony says, which is perfectly on-brand for him, frankly.

He probably isn’t expecting the Captain to turn on him next, snapping an accusing finger in his direction. “Remind me how you made your name? Sorry, your father’s name—”

“Whoa,” Tony says, a little angrily. “When did this become about me?”

Carter smiles, all teeth and red lips. “Oh darling, isn’t everything?”

Natasha can’t quite believe how savage she is. She’s  _ dominating _ this space, taking command of the conversation and giving no quarter. That could be expected of Lady Liberty, what isn’t expected is the snarling way she’s attacking everyone around her. Like she’s surrounded by enemies. She’s lashing out in a way Natasha hasn’t seen since… well, since the last time she looked over the records of her own early days at SHIELD. 

“Whose side are you even on?” Natasha marvels.

The anger turns on her next, and Natasha is unexpectedly, resentfully  _ impressed _ by the sheer forcefulness of the Captain’s presence.  _ “You’re _ going to ask  _ me _ that? Really?”

Normally Natasha wouldn’t even twitch to be called out as a double agent. She’s made a profession of it. She’s taken that and a dozen other names hurled at her —  _ bitch, traitor, black widow _ — and worn them like crowns. But today— 

_ You lie and kill, in the service of liars and killers. _

“I thought humans were more evolved than this,” says the other Asgardian.

“Excuse me,” Fury interrupts. “Do we come to your planet and blow shit up?”

Thor’s booming voice again: “You mistrust your own champions—”

Natasha rolls her eyes towards him. “You want to tell me Asgard doesn’t monitor potential threats?” She looks back to the Captain, because she's apparently the most unstable element here. “That’s all SHIELD does. Monitor potential threats.”

“Lady Liberty is a threat?” Banner says, in his polite way, full of restraint, full of the  _ anger _ he’s so carefully holding back.

“Well I wasn’t before,” Carter says with a kind of savage glee. “But I’m happy to give it a whirl.”

“We’re  _ all _ threats,” Natasha says. She’s unaccustomed to being the voice of reason, the soothing influence. This really isn’t what she was built for.

“Wait,  _ you’re _ on that list?” Stark says, in his brattiest voice. “Is that above or below angry bees?”

“Show some respect,” Carter snaps, turning on Stark.

“You know, Red Menace was right,” Tony says, grinning that asshole grin. “Whose side are you on?”

Carter's expression cracks open for a split second, and Natasha thinks—

Oh. 

Everyone on her side is dead. Last woman standing.

The shutters close quickly.

“You people are so petty,” Thor is saying. “And tiny. You talk of  _ sides _ while your world hangs in the balance.”

_ —and you bargain for one man?—  _

“This isn’t protection,” Thor concludes. “This is chaos!”

“What were you expecting?” Banner says, bitter. “Look at us, this isn’t a team, this is a time bomb.”

_ And Carter might be the short fuse, but he's the explosive, _ Natasha thinks, and reminds herself that Banner is still the objective here. “Doctor, you need to step away,” she says. 

Bruce steps closer to the scepter instead. “Step away where?” He waves at Fury. “He rented my room.”

“Okay,” Fury says. “Let’s just take it down a notch.”

It's the wrong thing to say. Bruce laughs bitterly. “You’re building bombs with technology you barely understand—” he says, striding across the room to jab his finger at a screen showing a warhead “—and you want  _ me _ to take it down a notch?”

“Yeah,” Stark pipes up. “Let’s see  _ him _ blow off some steam.”

“Shut up, Tony,” the Captain barks, without taking her eyes off Banner.

Tony steps into her space. Bad idea. “Why don’t you make me?”

She looks down at him and laughs, derisive.  _ “Make you? _ Who the hell do you think you are?”

“Uh, Iron Man? You might not have heard about me, I know you’ve been napping—”

She turns to face him properly, still broadcasting amusement and scorn. “Iron Man’s a costume.”

_ “You’re _ gonna lecture  _ me _ about wearing a costume?”

“Without that suit, what are you  _ really?” _

Tony cocks his head a little — to hide the fact that he has to look up at her, Natasha thinks. “Genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist.”

Carter's eyebrows go way up. “Philanthropist?” Her voice is soft, almost gentle now. “I’ve seen footage of your... philanthropy. It’s got quite the body count.” A muscle twitches in Tony’s jaw. Carter takes another step in, looking over Tony, shamelessly using her height to advantage. “Starks. You just can’t help it, can you. I really thought you’d be better than Howard.”

It lands like the punch it’s meant to be. Tony’s jaw tenses. “That’s pretty rich coming from one of his laboratory experiments. He  _ made you.” _

“You really think that I got the serum  _ in 1942 _ because it was handed to me?  _ Me? _ That I hadn’t earned it?” She gives him a withering look. “I could teach you a thing or two about  _ earning _ the name hero. I’ve known heroes.” She gives him a look, up and down. “You know,  _ real _ heroes.”

Tony looks like he’s trying to smile, but can’t quite manage it. “You know I’m not afraid to hit an old lady.”

Carter leans down a little, her face just that much closer to his: “You want to have a go?” she asks, sounding almost earnest. “That’s fine, darling,” she says, in a parody of a motherly voice. “Promise I won’t hit back until you’ve put on the suit.”

Just when Natasha thinks that Tony might actually take a swing, the room explodes, and the ground drops out, dumping Natasha and Bruce down into a nightmare.

 

 

 

 

 


	3. No Holds Barred

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for character death in this chapter.

 

 

 

After the fight to keep the helicarrier in the air, and the Hulk getting thrown out of the ship entirely, and Thor falling…  

After the voice crackles in over her comms and says “Agent Hill is down...” and Natasha thinks: _I forgot to ask her what she meant about Carter._ But then she pushes that thought away, swallows it back because she’s got a job to do. She’s got to keep moving forward.

She’s got to keep an eye on Clint because someone has to, and she’s the one best equipped to do it, and it’s easier than letting herself think about any of the rest of it. She can’t think about Maria, she can’t wonder where Thor is, or where Loki is. She certainly can’t think about soft, smiling Bruce Banner turning into that green rage nightmare.

Clint is cleaning up in the bathroom and Natasha wishes they were still talking, because she really doesn’t want to think about that. Being powerless in the face of power was one kind of horror, but to lose control like that — Bruce Banner is living her worst nightmare.

The door opens and the Captain comes in. She’s still wearing the wide-leg pants, though now significantly less pristine. Cap’s got her leather jacket on too, belted tight around her waist. A part of Natasha wonders what that must have been like: fighting off Loki’s goons and restarting the helicarrier’s engine while wearing thin linen pants and a thinner white blouse.

“Time to go,” Cap says. She fills most of the doorway, her shoulders broad under her leather jacket. Serum enhancements. If someone ever gave Natasha whatever version of the serum they gave Bruce, what would _she_ turn into? She pictures something black and dripping, big enough to dwarf the Hulk; a slavering Rottweiler to Banner’s angry kitten. She pictures never being able to turn human again. And if _Carter_ had gotten Banner’s version of the serum—

Natasha puts the thought aside. “Go where?” she asks.

“I’ll explain on the way. I don’t suppose you fly one of those jets?”

The door to the bathroom opens. Clint looks like hell, but better than he did. “I can.”

The Captain looks to Natasha — lord knows why she looks to Natasha for reassurance, but she does.

Natasha gives one deliberate nod. Clint’s good to go.

“You have a suit?” Carter asks Clint.

Clint nods.

“Then suit up.”

 

* * *

 

Natasha spends a frankly embarrassing amount of time looking for her locker — which surely _must_ be in here _somewhere_ — before she remembers that she is no longer the sole woman on the team. She steps out of the secure locker room for superheroes with expensive suits, and sure enough across the hall there’s a _second_ locker room for superheroes with expensive suits and also female pronouns.

The Captain is already in there. She’s stripped off her leather jacket and her blouse — the latter had been reduced to tatters and bloodstains. She’s standing there in just her wide-legged trousers and her old-fashioned bra. She’s got a first aid kit open on the bench, swabbing at a nasty bullet graze over her ribs.

“Alright there, Cap?” Natasha asks.

“Fine,” Carter replies, without even looking up. “It’ll close in a minute.”

Superserum, Natasha knows. She goes to the only other locker in the room and keys in her Avengers Initiative ID. It swishes open and for a moment she stares at the range of equipment, her options. What the _hell_ is she supposed to bring when the only thing she knows about the enemy is that they’re going to be coming from _outer space?_

In the shiny surface of the locker next to hers, she sees the Captain stripping off her trousers now, and cannot help noticing the ropy muscles in her thighs, the powerful flexing of her back and shoulders as she reaches back to unhook her bra and—

_Start with body armor, that’s always a given,_ Natasha thinks to herself, and gets to suiting up. She strips out of her SHIELD uniform and wiggles into the Black Widow catsuit. Thing’s a bitch to get into, but Stark says it’s got to be skintight or the something something won’t properly insulate against the whatever. She stopped listening two seconds in because a) she didn’t care, and b) it didn’t matter.

After the catsuit comes the body armor. First the knee pads, the elbow pads, then the vest. She zips it all the way to her throat and thanks Lenin once again that Maria was in charge of their gear and uniforms because—

But she can’t think about Maria right now. She’ll believe that Maria’s dead when she sees the corpse herself and not a second before.

She snaps her gauntlets in place and checks the connection to the battery pack on her belt. They light up blue and crackle satisfyingly.

“Damn,” Carter says from the other side of the room.

Natasha turns her head and gets an eyeful of Lady Liberty trying to reach a loose strap right in the middle of her back. “Need a hand there, Cap?”

“Do you mind?” Carter says, looking over her shoulder.

Natasha shakes her head and crosses the locker room. There’s a series of snaps up the back of the Captain’s uniform. It isn’t quite so form fitting as Natasha’s: bulky with thick canvas and Kevlar inserts, but still loose enough for her to move in. The armor of a tank versus the armor of a stealth jet, Natasha supposes. Or — thinking of Clint’s unfortunate D&D phase — the armor of a rogue versus the armor of a paladin. She feels a bit like a squire just now and briefly imagines shining steel in the place of red, white, and blue Kevlar. She taps Carter’s shoulder when it’s done, and the Captain picks up the shoulder armor and slips it over her head. Natasha smooths down the backplate for her, makes sure that the Velcro has caught, and pats Cap’s back to let her know it’s secure.

“Ta very much.”

Natasha steps back as Cap shrugs into the harness for her shield and then turns.

She looks _good._ She’s already _stacked,_ and the armor just makes her shoulders seem even broader, her thighs even thicker and—

Natasha wants to be mad about it, but Carter is actually smiling, for real, for the first time since Natasha laid eyes on her. It’s a small one, but unmistakable with that red lipstick.

“I’ll confess, I was a little worried it would be spandex.” She looks up. Her brown eyes glitter with amusement. “You know. Like the comics?”

Natasha shrugs. “Not a lot of comics in Soviet Russia,” she says, conveniently neglecting to mention that there had been many _many_ comics in her American culture training sessions. Especially the early ones, the ones she doesn’t fully remember, because… well, there are a lot of things she doesn’t remember. That isn’t the point.

“Lucky you,” Carter mutters. “This is much more like my actual uniform than I was expecting. To be honest, even that one didn’t… didn’t fit as well as this one.” Something about the way she says it, the little pause, makes Natasha wonder whether she means the uniform, or the title, or the whole _Lady Liberty_ schtick. “Make do and mend, you know? It was wartime, we did what we had to.”

Natasha looks down. “Maria was a fan of Captain Carter, not Lady Liberty.” She turns away and picks up her thigh holsters. For a moment there’s just the click click click of them fitting into place.

“I’m sorry,” Carter says quietly. “I know she was a friend of yours.”

Natasha secures her holster straps. Carter isn’t _the last_ person she wants to talk to about this, but she’s definitely second or third on that list. “Yeah well, they don’t call me the Widow because I’ve never lost anyone.”

She remembers the cold room. The cold body on the slab. The cold laughter of the handler. _Black Widow._

“I’m also sorry about what happened in the lab,” Carter adds.

For a split second, Natasha thinks Carter means the other lab, the one from her memory. Then she shakes herself out of it and shrugs. “Loki was manipulating us. I know it wasn’t you.”

“Oh, it was,” Carter says with a sigh. “Just... usually I keep a better lid on it. I let my temper get the better of me and I apologize.”

Natasha looks over, intrigued, and finds Carter looking steadily back, brown gaze unflinching. She might have been unwilling to put on the Lady Liberty costume, but she wears it well.

“Thank you,” Natasha says. “I appreciate that, but it’s really not necessary. Believe me, I get it.” She checks her two pistols and slides them home, then turns. “You ready?”

The Captain hooks her shield into place on her back — does she even _have_ a sidearm? — and nods. “Ready.”

 

* * *

 

There are aliens pouring out of the sky. There are _aliens_ pouring out of the _sky_ and there’s one with a _giant laser gun axe_ and _three rows of teeth_ and it’s trying to _stab her._ And she’s stuck here grappling with the fucking thing instead of dealing with what really matters — i.e. _the giant hole in the sky._ You know, the one with _all the aliens coming through it._

She hooks her leg up over the Chitauri’s shoulder and grabs her ankle with the other hand, making sure she’s clear to use her gauntlet before jabbing it deep into the thing’s neck and turning the power all the way up. The alien jerks and goes to its knees — and more importantly, drops the giant laser gun axe. She scrambles away, snatches it up, and blasts the sucker in the face.

A thud behind her makes her whirl, weapon at the ready, but—

It’s Carter, with the shield up and a warning look on her face. It still takes Natasha a beat and a half to reign in her adrenaline.

She lets the alien’s gun drop and sags back against the car behind her.

“Alright?” Carter asks. Her hair is coming out of its coif, falling across her face. Natasha wonders why she doesn’t wear a helmet. But then, Natasha is one to talk.

She ignores the question. “Cap, none of this is going to mean a damn thing if we don’t close that portal.”

“Guns don’t work on it,” Carter says. “There’s no point wasting energy on—“

“Maybe it’s not about guns.” She glances around, sees more Chitauri swarming over the cars in the distance. “Won’t know for sure until we get eyes on it.”

“Right. You’re gonna need a ride up there.” Carter‘s hand is already going to her ear like she’s going to — what? Call Iron Man off the space whales? Who’s going to take a break from their busy schedule of single-handedly defending the city from an entire army in order to give Natasha a ride to the top of Stark Tower?

Natasha hears the whine of scooters incoming. She’s tired just _thinking_ about it, but… “I’ve got a ride.” She kicks the rifle out of the way and trudges to the far side of the overpass. “Could use a boost though.” She jerks her chin up.

Carter looks at the incoming airborne hostiles, then back at Natasha. Her red lips make a perfect _o,_ and her brown eyes go wide and wondering. Awestruck even. Something in Natasha purrs with satisfaction _._ “Blimey — are you sure?”

Natasha watches the scooters coming, gauges their speed, the distance, the height she’ll need. “Yeah,” she says. “It’ll be fun.”

The Captain laughs.  It’s a surprisingly deep and musical laugh. Natasha has a split second to think that it’s a _nice_ laugh before Carter is backing up and bracing, shield at the ready. She meets Natasha’s gaze and nods. Natasha thinks she’s got enough space. She can get a running start, jump off that car hood, land dead center on the shield, and then —

Somewhere in Russia, a gymnastics teacher with KGB affiliations is about to punch the air in victory.

 

* * *

 

After the battle, and the bomb, and Stark falling from the sky, and getting Loki into custody, and getting the Hulk to be Bruce again, Stark says: “Medical suite in the basement is still intact, by the way. Normie humans can go there for a check up.” He points at Thor. “You got stabbed, right? Do they use medical grade superglue on Asgard?”

“How about you _all_ go down to Medical,” Carter says, in a tone that brooks no argument. Natasha had heard the despair in Carter’s voice when she said _close it,_ and then the desperate relief of _we won._ She doesn’t know if Tony got a full apology like she did, but it’s clear to Natasha that Carter cares deeply and about everyone on this team.

“And then!” Tony starts.

“Shawarma _after,”_ Carter insists.

Natasha makes a show of going along meekly.

But she also splits off from the group before they actually get to Medical, because. Well. _Medical._

She sets herself up in the nearest bathroom with a bottle of alcohol she stole on reflex from Stark’s bar and the mini medical kit in her utility belt. Which is basically just superglue and painkillers. It’s fine. It’s plenty. She gets out of her body armor, unzips her suit and gets to work.

She’s five minutes in when the door opens. She’s got a pistol in her hand before she fully registers the blue shoulders, the white star, the hair coming loose around her face.

The lipstick is still flawless.

Natasha decides that she hates it.

She lowers her pistol. “Well,” she says. “This looks bad.”

“Why aren’t you in Medical?” Carter demands.

“Why aren’t _you_ in Medical?” Natasha retorts.

A beat of silence. Carter stares at Natasha, and gives nothing away. Natasha stares back, and defiantly refuses to fidget even though she’s just wearing a sports bra and the bike shorts that keep the Widow catsuit from crawling up her ass.

To her surprise, Carter just closes the door behind her and turns the latch.

“Habit,” Cap says. “You know how it is. Show no weakness.”

Natasha cocks her head a little to ask the question.

“Woman Captain,” Carter says. She’s already pulling off her armor, tossing it over the nearest counter. She opens a cargo pocket on her tac pants, pulls out a medical kit slightly more complete than Natasha’s and sets it between them. “Most of the unit are men.”

“No one’s going to think less of you for—“

“It’s an _old_ habit,” Carter elaborates, sounding a little… sharp maybe. Brittle, Natasha thinks. 1945 — the whole _war,_ with all its attached baggage — was just a few months ago for her.

“Right,” Natasha says.

Carter nods. A muscle in her jaw goes tight for a moment. She reaches around again to try and get the snaps on her back and makes a noise of frustration.

“I got it,” Natasha says, stepping up. The Captain makes a vague noise of gratitude and leans against the counter, hunching her shoulders in a little. Natasha unclicks the straps in the back and undoes the zip. It falls open. The black racerback sports bra underneath looks like open parentheses, highlighting the muscles of her back and shoulders. The Captain sighs and shifts — relief at being freed from the suit, probably. Muscles bunch and ripple under her pale skin and Natasha has to blink away a series of mental error messages and shrieking panicky alarms.

She shakes her head sharply. “Good to go, Cap.” She spots a stack of sterile bandages in the now-open medical kit from Cap’s tac pants and points to them. “May I?”

“Of course. So what’s your excuse for avoiding Medical?” Carter asks as she begins to strip out of the rest of the suit.

Natasha focuses on the gash on her thigh. It’s already glued shut, but since she’s _got_ bandages she might as well cover it up. Better safe than sorry and all that.

“Or is that… should I not ask?” Carter says, a moment later.

“It’s fine,” Natasha says brusquely. “There was a lot of medical… stuff. Back when they were training me. Before I joined SHIELD. I don’t _really_ remember a lot of it, but that just means I never quite know what’s going to set me off.”

“I’m sorry.” It sounds like she _means it,_ too: sincere and sympathetic and full of understanding.

_Ugh. Gross._

Natasha grimaces. “Well. You know how it is. Show no weakness.”

“Are you actually alright, though?” Carter asks. “That stuff with the Hulk wasn’t exactly light. And flying murder whales from space are bound to make anyone a little jumpy.”

“Ahh, I’ll be fine, I’ve got a whole system worked out.”

“A system that doesn’t involve seeing any medical professionals?” She points to the bottle of alcohol and quirks a brow. “For drinking or sterilizing?”

“I mean, it _was_ for me to drink,” Natasha says. “But it’s overpriced and it’s Tony’s. So help yourself.” Natasha shrugs and goes back to tending to her wounds. “If it gets bad, I promise I’ll go to the doctor, Captain.” She pronounces it like a synonym for _Mom._

Carter takes some vodka and uses gauze to wipe it over a scrape on the wiry muscles of her bicep. “Under the circumstances, Romanoff, I think you can call me Peggy.” She sets the bottle down with a thunk on the counter.

Natasha regards the Captain — Peggy — in the mirror for a moment. She’s prodding at her ribs — probably checking to see if any are broken. They’re already black and blue, and the muscles of her stomach go tense when she prods a little too hard.

Natasha thinks about asking whether Peggy is actually alright. She thinks about asking whether Peggy has a system. But she suspects she already knows what the answer will be.

_Show no weakness,_ after all. Natasha can respect that.

“Natalia,” she says, and catches Peggy’s gaze in the mirror. Warm brown meets cool blue-green. “But my friends call me Natasha.” She looks down and sniffs. “You yeeted me onto an alien’s flying Vespa. I think we’ve reached that point.”

Peggy’s startled chuckle is just as deep and musical as it was before and Natasha decides that she hates the laugh somewhat less than she hates Peggy’s lipstick.

 

* * *

 

Before Natasha does anything else, she goes to see Maria’s body. It’s cold in the makeshift morgue. She tries not to think about any other cold rooms, but it’s hard. There are lots of bodies laid out here, in rows on the floor because there weren’t enough tables. Maria’s is still on the stretcher they used to bring her down here, and she’s the only one not in a body bag.

Natasha isn’t the sentimental sort. She pulls the sheet far enough down to expose Maria’s throat and puts her fingers on Maria’s pulse point. She knows just by looking that there won’t be one, but she’s always been better at believing things she can lay her hands on.

_What did you mean when you said you were worried about Carter? What did you mean when you said if anyone would understand it would be me? I’m not done talking to you, Maria._

But Maria’s eyes are closed, and her skin is clammy cold and completely still under Natasha’s fingers.

Natasha holds her own breath for a moment, then takes her fingers away from Maria’s neck and puts her hand on Maria’s forehead. _Goodbye,_ she thinks, and tries to make it feel real.

 

 

 

 

 


	4. Eight Count

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TWO ARTS BY ESAAEL THIS CHAPTER!!!

 

 

 

After all is said and done, the Avengers shake hands and go their separate ways. Or, rather, they pair off. Mostly. Bruce leaves with Tony. Loki and Thor leave together. Natasha has every intention of heading out with Clint, but…

“Just a sec,” she says to Clint, and crosses the road to where the last member of the team is getting on her motorcycle. Her _motorcycle._ Natasha has never hated a vehicle more than she hates the _stupid, old-fashioned,_ black Harley Liberator between Peggy Carter’s legs.

“Peggy!” Natasha calls.

Peggy looks up, her artful ringlets pulled into a low ponytail that slithers over her shoulder as she turns her head.

Natasha sticks out her hand. “Phone,” she says. “Gimme.”

Peggy gives her a quizzical look and sets her helmet on the seat in front of her. She digs in one of the saddlebags, which gives Natasha plenty of time to admire Peggy’s retro-chic high-waisted jeans and boots and the way she—

“Uh. Here you go,” Peggy says, handing over the smartphone like it might be live ordinance.

Natasha looks from the phone to Peggy and back to the phone. She peels the plastic protector off the screen. “So how long have you been out of the ice, exactly? The file didn’t specify.” It had been heavily redacted.

Peggy can’t quite hide her grimace. “Not long. Why do you ask?”

“No reason.” Natasha pulls up Peggy’s contact list. It’s a bunch of unnamed numbers that Natasha mostly recognizes. She taps away for a few minutes, naming Fury’s direct line “Mad-Eye Moody” and Tony “Winter is Coming.” Bruce becomes “The Jolly Green Giant” and Clint gets listed as “Katniss.” Decoding them will be a good education for Peggy. Natasha lists herself as Baba Yaga.

She sends a text to herself from Peggy’s phone. It’s the lipstick emoji. Then she hands the phone back to Peggy. “There. We don’t really do phone calls anymore if we can possibly avoid it. Text-based only.”

“Text-based only? How retro. Whatever next, telegrams? We could bring back the pony express.”

Natasha allows herself a slow blink and a slight smile. “Smoke signals.”

“Postcards.” Peggy’s teeth are very white against her red red lips. “ ‘Wish you were here.’ ”

Natasha steps back and lets herself watch as the Captain pulls on her helmet and starts up the old Harley. Drives off into the sunset. A real hero, just like Maria had promised. Natasha can’t help marveling at how _real_ Peggy is turning out to be.

 

* * *

 

Natasha and Clint crash for the night at their favorite safehouse in the city. She’s just dropping onto the couch with a groan when her secure phone starts buzzing against her hip. She digs around in her tracksuit bottoms and pulls it out. _Call From… The Boss._

“Somebody’s in trouble,” she singsongs, before flipping the phone open. “Yeah, Boss?”

“Is he okay?” Laura Barton asks.

“Didn’t he call you?” Natasha turns to glare at Clint, who is putting their leftover shawarma in the fridge.

Clint grinds his teeth and closes the fridge hard enough that it bounces back open. He swears at it.

“Of _course_ he called me. He said he was fine. But I can tell when he’s _lying_ because I’m not an _idiot.”_

“No mortal peril,” Natasha reports. “I’ve got eyes on him.”

“Okay,” Laura says. “You’re bringing him back ASAP.”

“We’re flying out first thing tomorrow.”

“And you’re staying for dinner before you slink off to whatever hidey hole you’ve got lined up.”

Natasha rolls her eyes. “Ugh, _fine.”_

“See you later, Nat.”

Natasha hangs up and gives Clint a look across the room. Clint seems to have found ancient popsicles in the back of the safehouse’s refrigerator and is currently sucking on a purple one like it’s a pacifier. If he thinks that’s going to save him from having this conversation he’s _extremely wrong._

“Since when do you lie to Laura?”

“I don’t,” Clint says defensively.

“We’ve talked about this, Clint, leave the lying to me.”

“I didn’t _lie,”_ Clint says, muffled around the frozen sugar water in his mouth. “I’m not actively bleeding, nothing is broken, I’m _fine.”_

“You’re not,” Natasha says.

As much as they both act unaffected, as much as they both pretend to be fine, neither of them are. How could they be? Maria’s _dead._

Something dark and serious flashes behind Clint’s eyes. It’s just a hint of what lies beneath but then he makes an over-exaggerated _gross_ face, sticking his purple tongue out before sticking the popsicle back in his mouth. “M’I kno’ ‘m no’,” he allows.

“You _know_ Laura’s okay with you not being okay,” Natasha says. _Not okay_ isn’t something that she and Clint do together, except in emergencies. Together, they mostly pretend to be fine. They bolster each other up with tough love and black humor so they can get on with the work. What Clint has with Laura is different.

He squirms like a bug pinned to a board. “M’yeah.”

“Only one of us can feasibly pull off the incurable loner thing and that’s me, so call your wife and talk to her.”

Clint sighs through his nose and pulls the popsicle out of his mouth. “I just don’t want to do it over the phone is all. I’ll talk to her about it when we’re home. I’ll talk to a _therapist_ too because I’m a _responsible adult person._ Okay?”

Natasha sniffs and shrugs. “Okay.”

Clint sucks moodily on his popsicle for a moment, eyes narrowed at Natasha. She meets his gaze with her best unblinking lizard stare. It’s a game they play; the staring game. The one who cracks first loses.

She never loses.

Clint rolls his eyes and mumbles something inarticulate around his popsicle.

Natasha smiles, satisfied to have won. “What was that?”

Clint pulls the popsicle out of his mouth and points it at her accusingly. “You can’t keep up the incurable loner act indefinitely,” he enunciates.

She blinks in surprise, which makes him do a little victory dance in place and point at her again. “HA!” he says.

“You already lost,” she says. “What the hell do you mean _act._ It’s not an _act.”_

“Oh please,” Clint says. _“Oh I’m a woman with no past and no future, I will live my life alone,_ come on. It’s a _gimmick,_ it’s not _sustainable.”_

“Well, we can’t all find Lauras,” Natasha says petulantly.

“Not if you don’t go _looking,”_ Clint snarks back.

Natasha steals his popsicle as punishment.

But it sticks in the back of her mind like a dart, slowly releasing something into her system.

 

* * *

 

Peggy might still be getting used to technology, but technology isn’t going to wait for her to catch up. Natasha has Google alerts set up for all the Avengers, just in case, and since Tony is actually keeping his head down for once, the first alert she gets is for Peggy.

 _Lady Liberty Sighted in Chicago_ , accompanied by a photo of Peggy posing with a small group of very excited girls throwing up peace signs.

The squirrely little motherfucker that Natasha is in the middle of crushing under her heel makes a choked sound and struggles a little.

“Shh,” Natasha tells him without looking away from her phone. Peggy’s squinting a little, looks somewhat confused. Her hair is neatly curled but her retro look is at least passably modern. She looks… good.

Infuriating.

Natasha narrows her eyes and steps down a little harder. The guy under her boot heel chokes and squirms.

 

* * *

 

Three weeks and perhaps half a dozen Captain Carter sightings later, Natasha is doing surveillance in an air vent. Well, actually, she’s playing Words With Friends in an air vent, waiting for her time to shine. There will be a change of guards in an hour or so; then, she can slip in, acquire the necessary intel, and slip out again before anyone realizes she’s been there. A silent notification pops up; it’s a picture and a text from a contact listed as Lady Lipstick.

The picture is of the Grand Canyon at dusk; the golden hour. The sky is an abstract canvas splashed with blue and gold, the rugged sandstone below a dark purple, hovering on the edge of red. With the screen two inches from her face, it’s almost like she’s there, out in the wide open spaces of Arizona, with jagged cliffsides and deep cuts and the distant silver glint of a river far, far below. It stretches out before her all the way to the horizon.

She returns to her cramped air vent, and the attached text. It reads:

_Wish you were here. Yours, Peggy._

Natasha frowns at the message. She can’t quite tell if Peggy is serious or not — is she just not sure how to text? Is it a little jab about the postcard thing?

There’s something deeply melancholy about the short message and the beautiful picture, but Natasha can’t quite put her finger on what. She’s got the feeling that she’s missing some context here.

Does Peggy actually wish that Natasha was there?

Natasha tries to summon up a spark of annoyance to get her through this trying time, but without Carter’s red lips actually there in front of her, it’s hard. She shifts in the uncomfortably cramped vent and considers her options. She could say _wish you were here_ back, with a picture of the air vent but then she pictures what it would actually be like to be squashed in this air vent with Captain Margaret Fucking Carter and all her fucking muscles.

Natasha grinds her teeth.

She decides to ignore it. For now.

 

* * *

 

In August, Buzzfeed runs a listicle titled _12 Times Peggy Carter Served Looks This Summer._ The first is a picture someone caught at a gas station. She’s filling the tank on her bike and wearing her big red sunglasses. She looks like a pin-up in those same high-waisted jeans she was wearing when she left New York and a white scoop-necked tee-shirt that shows off her impressive cleavage as well as the wiry strength in her arms.

How dare she?

Two scrolls down, there’s the same jeans, looking completely different just by the addition of ballet flats and a striped sweater. Now she looks like she’s on vacation in the south of France. Her curls are looser and she’s walking fast with her chin held high.

Unacceptable.

Natasha scrolls further. Peggy in a red dress worthy of Joan Holloway. Peggy visiting a museum in — maddening — a _suit._ A damn _three piece suit._ With a _tie._ Where the hell was she hiding that? She’s on a _motorcycle._ Did she have it stashed in her damn saddlebags? _How?_

The last one is recent; from just a few days ago. It’s taken from a distance: Peggy on a beach, wearing a big floppy hat and a vintage-style one-piece swimsuit. She’s got a gauzy wrap skirt sitting low on her hips, showing a tantalizing strip of pale, shapely leg. She’s staring out at the Pacific Ocean like she’s planning to conquer it. Her hair is longer, and uncurled, the salt water loosening it into lazy waves.

Filled with rage, Natasha opens the chat.

_hows cali?_

To her surprise, a typing bubble starts bouncing only a minute later. Natasha is doing covert surveillance from a Starbucks, so this is all compatible with her cover.

_Turns out I still can’t get a decent tan. I burn, I peel, I emerge an English Rose. I wish Erskine had warned me. How’s… wherever you are?_

Natasha looks up and scowls at the street. _Where she is_ is India, the height of monsoon season. _wet,_ she types back, and then sends a series of stabby knife emojis.

 

* * *

 

The next she hears of Peggy is another news alert on her phone. It’s September and TMZ is doing a fluff piece about how Captain Carter is going back to Europe.

 _what abt the bike?_ Natasha texts her. The typing bubbles appear and vanish several times before settling on:

_Beg pardon?_

The fact that it’s that short gives Natasha hope that Peggy can be taught. _Ur going 2 Europe. What did u do w/ the bike?_

Peggy is saved in Natasha’s phone with a Rosie the Riveter icon. After a moment, Peggy’s answer appears. _Oh I see. I gave it to a girl whose bike got stolen._

Of course she did. _Ur gross._

After a very long moment of deliberation, Peggy sends back a winky face emoji.

 

* * *

 

Natasha is binging Dog Cops between missions when she gets a selfie from Paris. Peggy is squinting into the sun, big floppy hat and red red lips and the Arc de Triomphe in the background.

She has a new motorcycle, Natasha is enraged to note.

_Nicer than the last time I was here._

Natasha sends back a selfie with an appropriately scowling and narrow eyed expression.

 _Jealousy doesn’t suit you, darling,_ Peggy scolds.

 

* * *

 

That Halloween Natasha receives a picture of an incognito Peggy (big sunglasses tucked into the neck of her shirt, cap and uncurled ponytail, no lipstick, baggy sweater) looking deeply unnerved with the Berlin Wall in the background. Natasha lets out a short laugh and thinks _Maria would love this._

The old stab of loss hits her under the ribs, but along with it, there’s an errant thought, a spark of inspiration struck off the rock of her absent friend.

Wait, she wonders, for the first time. Why is she texting _me?_

The answer comes a little too easily: she doesn’t have anyone else, does she.

It’s a shift in the landscape, this piece of intel that clicks into place and suddenly paints over all their previous interactions. For all her apparent confidence, all her standing tall, her ferocious independence, Peggy is completely alone.

Everything makes a little bit more sense when seen through that lens. She thinks of Peggy lashing out, all that rage under her surfaces. She thinks of the rest of them pairing off; Bruce and Tony, Thor and Loki, her and Clint, while Peggy rode off alone on her motorcycle. She thinks of that first ‘postcard.’ _Wish you were here._

Suddenly, Natasha can’t unsee the desperate loneliness coloring everything Peggy has done so far.

She wants to be annoyed by it, the way she’s annoyed by the lipstick, and the _three piece suit,_ and the _fucking motorcycle._ Unfortunately, she can’t quite muster up the requisite irritation. She remembers a little too clearly what it’s like to be _that_ alone in the world.

 

* * *

 

Peggy's been soul-searching via motorcycle and text message for almost six months. Natasha goes to the Bartons’ for Christmas, bearing a stolen prototype of some kind of fancy new trendy toy that lights up and makes eighteen very annoying sounds. The kids are going to love it. Clint and Laura will murder her.

It's late now, and the kids are, if not asleep, at least pretending to be. Laura and Natasha and Clint are taking turns with the vodka Natasha brought and bitching about work. Then, Natasha's phone pings with another text.

It's a picture of the Gherkin.

A moment later, a message follows:

_london why_

No punctuation and no capitalization. Little baby's all grown up and texting like a millennial. Natasha couldn't be prouder. She sends back a screen cap from one of Peggy's comics — the one where she ditches her Lady Liberty persona to become Miss Union Jack. The “uniform” is basically a swimsuit made out of the British flag. Natasha follows that up with the poop emoji.

Peggy sends back a gif of the Tenth Doctor standing forlornly in the rain.

Natasha lets out a single sharp _ha!_ and thinks about asking what Peggy thinks of the new Doctor. It’s good to know that Peggy is connecting with an important touchstone from her native culture that she missed out on, and—

Clint clears his throat.

Natasha looks up to find she’s getting it from both Barton barrels there. Laura’s brows are way, way up, and Clint is squinting at her like she’s a very confusing technical manual that’s been translated from Chinese to French to English via Google.

“What?” Natasha says.

“You’re laughing at your phone,” Laura observes.

“Like a sixteen year old getting a text from her crush,” Clint adds.

Natasha rolls her eyes. “When I was sixteen I already knew how to kill a man with my thighs.” She doesn’t _know_ that, not for sure. But she’s confident in surmising as much.

“Yeah, okay,” Laura says slowly. She and Clint share one of their creepy couple mind-reading looks. Disgusting.

“Alright, you two just lost vodka privileges,” Natasha says. “Me and my good friend here—” she picks up the bottle “—are going to bed now. Goodnight.”

Natasha leaves them to emote judgmentally at each other. She trudges noiselessly up past the kids’ rooms to the guest room that’s actually basically hers. She closes the door behind her, twists the cap off the vodka, takes a swig. She puts her back against the door, slides down to sit there for a moment in the familiar shadows.

“I’m really fucked, aren’t I,” she tells the vodka, in one of those moments of self-reflection she does her best to avoid whenever possible.

The vodka doesn’t judge her. The vodka is a good friend. She takes another swig. She’s pretty sure that the effects of alcohol on her are entirely psychosomatic, just like coffee and 9 out of 10 poisons, thanks to the Red Room. But she likes the burn. She likes the taste the way she likes the taste of blood in her mouth. She likes the smell the way she likes the smell of gunpowder. She likes it the way she likes the ache of bruises and sore muscles after a good fight. 

She takes another swig and puts her head back against the door. Honestly, _fuck_ Captain Carter — no, not like _that,_ brain, _shut up._

She hates the way she thinks about Carter. She hates how _fucking unprofessional_ it is. Carter’s a _co-worker,_ not a _piece of meat,_ and Natasha should have more self control than this.

She hates Captain Carter’s stupid red lipstick and her awful brown eyes and the way her hair sticks to her forehead when she’s sweaty and the way her thighs are like tree trunks and…

And she especially hates the way Peggy smiles when it’s a real smile. She hates the way her laugh is so much deeper than Natasha expected. She hates the way that Peggy is _smart_ and _funny_ and so— so—

Her phone buzzes against her hip again. She looks down. It’s Carter, of course. Rage is the emotion she decides on.

_Don’t think I didn’t notice how quickly you responded._

_I know this means you’ve read the comics_

_And have snaps from them saved on your phone._

_[poop emoji]_

Natasha thumps her head back against the door, a little harder this time, then gets up to fall face first into the guest bed that is really her bed.

  
  
In the morning, Tony _fucking_ Stark gives his home address to a terrorist.

 

 

 

 

 


	5. Swinging for the Fences

  
  
  


The Thursday after James Rhodes saves the president and Tony  _ fucking _ Stark blows up every single one of his suits, Captain Margaret Elizabeth Carter comes striding into SHIELD HQ wearing a long black coat with a thick fur collar. She looks like she just came from the opera, maybe. Or her fourth husband’s funeral. She drops her CV on the front desk, says “Give that to Director Fury,” and leaves without saying a word to anyone else.

Natasha watches the show from the coffee bar. She is particularly enamored of the shoes peeping out from under the hem, which are old combat boots. Vintage. Genuine, if Natasha had to guess. They look like they’d be good to kick down a door or two. She suspects that no one else noticed them because they were too distracted by the rest of the look. Peggy is tall enough to look like she’s wearing heels even when she isn’t.

Natasha drops her coffee cup into the recycling and slips out the back. She has to vault over a garbage bin and scramble over a chain link fence but she’s not even breathing hard when she slides around the corner of the parking deck and finds Captain Margaret Elizabeth Carter kicking the shit out of a concrete parking stop.

The parking stop shifts with a groan and a crunch.

Natasha clears her throat.

Peggy turns. The coat has fallen open and underneath she’s wearing—

Leggings and a big loose-necked sweater. The sweater hangs halfway down her thighs. Which are, Natasha can’t help noticing once more, as big around as… like… a small toddler maybe. She could crush a coconut with those things. The big cuddly sweater and leggings don't look right on her though. Comfortable, maybe, but it doesn't sit right on her frame in a way that Natasha can't quite figure out for a moment.

She wears it the way other people wear a costume. And that’s the thing about the high-waisted pants that Natasha noticed all those months ago on the helicarrier. That’s the thing that stuck in the back of her brain and wouldn’t let go: on anyone else, those clothes would have been a costume, but her body was made to wear things like that. Even now, the big cuddly sweater sits oddly on her frame. The leggings don’t fit her because she doesn’t know how they’re really supposed to fit. It looks like a costume because she’s not comfortable wearing it.

“Did you come straight from the airport?” she asks.

Peggy glares and pulls her coat sharply closed. “Yes.” She’s got her big sunglasses up on her head, which — up close her curls  _ are _ a little frizzy, actually. Her lipstick is still flawless. Natasha hates it so much. “I was trying to be incognito.”

Natasha looks up (and up and up). “Hm. How’d that work out for you?”

“Fine,” Peggy says, a little waspish. Bad mood it is, then.

“What did the concrete do to you?” Natasha asks, jerking her chin at the crumbled remains.

Peggy grimaces. “Innocent bystander.”

Natasha can’t quite parse what war the parking stop was standing by _ , _ so she hums, shows nothing on her face, and observes: “You’re joining SHIELD.” 

Peggy sighs. “I am. And all they had to do was let Tony Stark shoot himself in the foot.”

“Nobody  _ lets _ Tony Stark do anything. He’ll shoot himself in the foot no matter what you do.”

“Well if I’m in bloody  _ London _ I’m  _ useless  _ and he’s—” she cuts herself off to kick the poor parking stop again.

“Those boots don’t deserve that either,” Natasha notes, folding her arms.

“Sorry,” Peggy says. 

“It’s ok. Seems like you’re going through some stuff.”

Peggy chews the inside of her lip for a moment. “It's just that. He’s all I have. As it happens,” she says, like the words are being pulled out of her with hooks.

Natasha frowns. She had not necessarily gotten that vibe from the way they were snapping and snarling at each other before the Chitauri hit London, but she knows better than most that affection doesn't necessarily look like affection. “You have nieces and nephews, don't you?” She cocks her head in a way that usually encourages people to keep talking. 

It seems to work on Peggy, because she sighs and leans against the side of the car. “My brother’s family. They didn’t like me then, they don’t like me now.”

“Really.” Natasha finds that very hard to believe.

Peggy’s jaw works. “Really,” she says. 

“And Stark is…” Natasha can’t help thinking of that revived comics run, of Reynard Clark and Peggy Carter’s tragic doomed romance, his real-life counterpart and his unceasing search over the Arctic Ocean, the part he played in founding SHIELD.

Peggy turns sharply, and with one more kick, the parking stop finally cracks in half. “Howard was like a  _ brother _ to me,” Peggy says, fists clenching and unclenching, staring at the broken parking stop. “Irritating as he was. Stupid as he could be sometimes. Careless and callous, yes, but... Brilliant. And for all that he was a philanderer and a cad, he respected my opinion. He didn’t care that I was a woman because he trusted me. He was one of only a handful of people who _ really _ trusted me. And he wanted to do better. Wanted to  _ be _ better. We  _ all _ did, because of—”

Peggy bites back whatever she was going to say, and suddenly Natasha has the strongest suspicion that the end of that sentence was supposed to be someone’s name. But she doesn’t press. Not now. She knows when not to push.

“I hate what they’ve done to him,” Peggy says, after a moment. “To what we had. Twisting it like that. It’d be funny, except. Well it isn’t. And it hurt his wife, his family. It hurt  _ Tony,  _ and—”

“And Tony’s all you have left of him.”

Peggy nods curtly. “The Howlies are dead. Howard’s dead. But Tony isn’t and I would rather—” a kick to the nearer half of the broken stop “—like—” another kick “—to  _ keep it that way.” _ The concrete finally comes free of its moorings entirely and bounces off the back wall. 

“Feel better?” Natasha asks.

Peggy takes a deep breath in and lets it out through her nose. “Much,” she says, unclenching her fists. Her shoulders slump and she gives Natasha a sheepish look. “Sorry. I just… rather unloaded on you, didn’t I.”

Natasha shrugs her best unbothered shrug. “I don’t mind.”

“Still. Not very professional of me.”

“You don’t actually work for SHIELD yet, get the unprofessionalism out now,” Natasha advises. 

Carter squints at her a little. “You know, you’re very hard to read.”

Doesn’t Natasha know it. Through years of practice and training, her expressions and her actual emotions have gone through complete divorce proceedings. They now have only a distant relationship, like second cousins that exchange telegrams every other month. Telegrams? Christ, Peggy is getting to her. Postcards — no,  _ phone calls. _ Texts, maybe. 

Peggy is staring at her, looking politely intrigued by whatever she is seeing — or not seeing — on Natasha’s face. 

Natasha clicks her tongue and winks. “And that’s just how I like it.”

Peggy laughs again, that surprisingly deep chuckle of hers. Musical. Melodious. Normally people don’t laugh when Natasha says things like that, or if they do they don’t mean it. Peggy laughs like she understands.

Terrible. Awful. Natasha hates her.

“Well,” Peggy says. “I look forward to working with you again, Agent Romanoff.”

“Very professional of you,” Natasha praises. 

Peggy graces her with a breathtaking red-lipped smile and opens the door of her car. “I am trying.”

If they’re going to be working together, Natasha needs to start thinking of her as Captain Carter again.

 

* * *

 

A couple of days later, Natasha gets called into Fury’s office. This isn’t unusual. Natasha isn’t worried. It just means that maybe she’ll get to change out of her monkey suit and into her catsuit sometime today. 

She comes into the office and finds the Captain already there in a simply devastating red blouse and black pencil skirt that just —  _ clings. _

Natasha’s feelings send a telegram to her face. The telegram is just a series of swear words and unnecessary punctuation so it’s hard to say what exactly her face does in response.

“Captain,” Natasha says. 

“Agent,” Carter says. Her lips are. Red. Of course. She smiles, but it’s thin, professional. 

“Captain Carter here is our newest SHIELD asset,” Director Fury says, leaning back in his chair and steepling his fingers. He smirks. There’s no other word for it.

Natasha hates him too.

“I heard,” Natasha says. Her brain kicks back into gear and her eyes narrow. “Why am... I here.”

“She needs a partner.”

_ Fuck. _ “Should you really be putting all your Avengers in one basket?”

“Who else is going to be able to keep up with her?” Fury asks, spreading his hands, widening his eye, the picture of innocence. 

Natasha’s eyes track from Fury, who’s grinning, to Carter, whose expression is unreadable. “I never work with a partner.”

“You work with Barton,” Fury says with a shrug.

“That’s different,” Natasha says. Clint brought her in. She trained with Clint, she  _ knows _ Clint. Clint’s “drunk man with a concussion saying fuck it” fighting style clicks perfectly with her “greased cat with amphetamines and a taser” fighting style. It’s a very unique situation.

“Well  _ I _ want to make her head of Alpha STRIKE, but she says that’s a bad idea,” Fury says.

“Respectfully, sir,” Carter says, and mostly manages to sound like she means  it. “I know that everyone here—” and by  _ here, _ Natasha reads  _ now _ “—knows me as Lady Liberty or Captain Carter, but I was an agent first and foremost.”

Natasha narrows her eyes. “You ran the most successful commando unit in military history.”

Carter gives her a look. “That’s different.”

“So you see my problem here,” Fury says. He looks at them with a small smile on his smug fucking face. “Here’s my solution: Captain, I’m giving you command of Alpha STRIKE, and Romanoff, you’ll be her partner.”

Natasha folds her arms. “Just to make sure that everyone is equally unhappy?”

Fury’s smile widens. “Both your concerns have been noted, but since I’m your boss, I regret to announce that neither of you actually get any say in the matter. Your first mission together is at the end of the month.”

“What kind of mission?” Natasha says, at the same time Carter says: “We need more than a month.”

“You don’t have more than a month,” Fury tells her, and then he turns his eye on Natasha. “Retrieve and secure.”

“Person or tech?” Natasha asks. “An 0-8-4?”

“Not an 0-8-4. Intel,” Fury says. “SI has been dealing with some data breaches related to the AIM…” he waves a hand in a way that encompasses the entire concept of  _ royal clusterfuck _ . “... fiasco.”

“SI has the best data security in the world,” Natasha says.

“Yeah, they do,” Fury agrees. “We think AIM’s after the arc reactor, but all they got was some old stuff. Could still be dangerous.”

Carter folds her arms. “How old?”

“About as old as you, Captain.” Fury smiles. “SI designs and schematics from the 40s and 50s that were never implemented.”

“Howard’s designs,” the Captain says, very flat.

Fury nods.

“You lost. Some of  _ Howard’s _ designs.”

Fury narrows his eye. “Yes. Normally Stark the Younger would go after them, but he’s having open heart surgery, so.”

“And you know who’s got them, and where they are, but you’re  _ not _ going to precision strike them into the ground?”

“Well, the facility in question is in the heart of Cleveland. And we’d like to confirm that all the designs are on site and haven’t been sent elsewhere,” Fury says. “Stark’s very particular about who he trusts to retrieve this kind of thing, and we’re happy to work with him on this, but we’re not overly worried about research that’s seventy years out of date.”

Carter levels a look that could wither a full-grown oak. “You’ve clearly never been on the receiving end of an HSS.”

“HSS?” Natasha says.

“Howard Stark Special,” Carter says.

“Even Howard Stark didn’t build the atom bomb alone,” Fury says, but there’s a tic of concern around his mouth.

“No, he invented a massager that could shatter bone and a heating vest that  _ exploded.” _ She takes a breath through her nose and lets it out in a huff. “You’re right. We don’t have a month. We need to mobilize faster than that, can you get us an in by the end of next week?”

“I think you’ll find we can do whatever you need,  _ Captain.” _

 

Carter comes to find her when the briefing is done. Natasha hears the click of heels coming up behind her, and then:

“Agent Romanoff,” she says, and Natasha turns to face her and finds that Carter looks uncharacteristically unsure of herself. She very rarely looks awkward, even though she is 6’2”, but right now she looks like she wishes she were a few inches shorter. “I wanted to apologize.”

“For what?” Natasha says, blankly.

“When I suggested that you and I would make a good team, I didn’t know that you preferred working alone. I knew you worked with Barton, I didn’t know he was an exception rather than a rule.”

Natasha shrugs. “It’s no big deal. Clint’s special, I trust Clint.”

Carter says _ha_ and looks down. It’s not a laugh, she actually _says_ _ha._ “Right,” she adds. “Of course.”

And then Natasha realizes what that sounded like. “Not that I don’t trust you, but—”

“You barely know me.” That thin, red-lipped smile again. “We fought aliens together one time and then exchanged… postcards.” The smile’s a little twisted at the corner now. Bitter.

Natasha wants to say  _ it’s not you, _ but that always sounds like a lie. She could say:  _ I don’t think you understand that my brain is a cage of barely tamed and badly socialized feral cats. I don’t trust anyone. I certainly don’t trust myself.  _ But that seems like oversharing. Instead she says: “I’d like to get to know you better.”

Peggy takes a breath in, straightens up a little, and nods. “Right,” she says again. “Er. Good.”

“I’m looking forward to working with you, Captain,” Natasha says, and smiles like she means it. 

 

* * *

 

A week and a half later, Natasha already has regrets. They arrive in Cleveland with Alpha STRIKE, and it’s not that Natasha  _ dislikes _ Rumlow or his team, but they’re a hammer and she’s a scalpel. Their styles are not compatible. Luckily, she’s not the one who will have to wrangle them, or decide when to use the hammer. 

As they’re touching down, Natasha says “Call it, Cap,” and Carter replies: “I’m with Romanoff—”

Maybe it’s just because she’s not crazy about working with Alpha STRIKE, and maybe it’s because Rumlow’s been trying to start banter all flight long, but Natasha  _ immediately _ wants to say:  _ I don’t need a babysitter. _ She wants to say:  _ You’ll just get underfoot.  _ She wants to say:  _ Who’s gonna see the forest if you’re down in the trees? _

But it’s…  _ Show No Weakness. _ Carter is the captain, and Natasha told her to call it, so she checks her stingers and says nothing. 

But that doesn’t mean she isn’t  _ right.  _

 

When the first alarm trips, Natasha and Carter are only halfway through the tedious business of burning Howard’s data out of AIM’s servers. They’re three basement levels down under a facility in the middle of fucking Cleveland, and Peggy’s breaking open filing cabinets, pulling out every SI schematic she can find while Natasha burns through every scan and digitization made in the last eight months, hunting down the back ups to the back ups to the back ups.

They both look up at the sound of alarms blaring several floors above, and then look to each other.

“Cap, Widow,” says Agent Klein in their ears. He’s their C2 node on this mission, with his fingers in all the feeds, watching their backs. “They know I’m here. They don’t know where you are yet, but it won’t be long, and I might not be able to give you much in the way of a heads up.”

Natasha lifts her brows at Carter. “Do we call in the cavalry?” 

Carter purses her red lips. “How close are you?” 

“Two minutes,” Natasha says, without having to check the progress bars. 

“Cap, you need backup?” says Rumlow over the comms.

Carter clicks her mic on. “Hold position for now, but be ready to go on my signal,” she orders, and clicks off again.

Natasha’s eye twitches, but she doesn’t say anything. She gives Carter an eloquent look. 

“Two minutes,” Carter reminds her.

It’s not Natasha’s job to question or second-guess. It’s not her job to think  _ this isn’t the War anymore. _ It not her job to think  _ we’ve got more than enough firepower, why not use it?  _ She’s just supposed to clear the computers and—

82 seconds later, Klein says: “They’ve got a bead on your location, Security’s on the way.”

“STRIKE, you’re up,” the Captain calls. 

“They won’t get here in time,” Natasha says, finishing up on the computer.

“Then we’ll go out to meet them,” Carter says, unhooking her shield. 

Natasha draws two pistols.

Carter gives her a mildly disapproving look. They are trying to minimize casualties, after all. On  _ both _ sides. “Come on.”

“You waited to call the cavalry, I get to make the call about whether I use lethal force,” Natasha says, unbothered. She waves to the door eloquently. “You first, Captain.”

Carter kicks down the door and goes out into the hall with her shield at the ready. Natasha stacks in behind her, pistols at the ready. They’ve barely gotten twenty feet before the shouting heralds the approach of guards. 

“Cover,” Peggy orders, and Natasha holsters a pistol to palm one of her flashbangs and deftly throws it to bounce off the wall and around the corner. Flash. Bang. Screeches. Peggy and Natasha come around the corner into exactly the kind of melee Natasha hates, because she and Carter are the only ones who know what they’re doing. 

That kind of fight should be easy, but it’s just embarrassing, like getting in a car crash because there was a twelve year old driving a tractor trailer going the other way. It’s the kind of fight that has a high risk of injury because it’s hard to predict what someone’s going to do when  _ they _ don’t know what they’re going to do. 

Natasha hisses when fire lances through her thigh. A stray bullet. If only that shield were a little bigger. If only Carter didn’t throw it so damn much. She ducks under Carter’s arm and shoots one the bastard in the face, which is some small comfort, and he’s the last one from this squad still standing, so that’s something too.

Carter gives her a look, and catches her shield without taking her eyes off Natasha. Natasha bares her teeth.

“He shot me first,” she complains, checking the wound. “Damn. This is gonna need—”

Natasha isn’t sure what exactly happens after that.

 

 

 

 

 


	6. On the Ropes

  
  
  


Natasha jerks out of unconsciousness in an unfamiliar bed, reaching for a knife that  _ isn’t there, _ and there’s  _ white all around her, _ and the  _ smell of antiseptic _ in her nose. She can hear her own heart rate spiking, the harsh beeps going haywire. Actually, that’s what brings her out of it: having her body betray her by showing fear, and having that fact broadcast to the entire room. That’s what makes her stop thinking like a panicked animal and start thinking like a Widow.

She’s alone in this room. They know enough to do that. She’s in the SHIELD infirmary. She’s been here maybe three times before: that time she took a bullet in the gut back in 2008, because she was up against someone better than her, for once. Twice in 2009: once because she got jabbed with a narcotic no one recognized, and then again that time she almost lost her arm. Funny. But she got better at avoiding it after that. She’s been  _ so careful _ since then.

She sits up, ignoring the pain in her head, her leg. It takes only a moment of focus to bring her heart rate back to level. She reaches for her chart, comes up short because of the IV.

Her skin crawls. It takes another moment to focus, to bring her pulse back under control. Again. 

She takes the IV out first —  _ carefully, _ she’s not  _ an idiot, _ she just can’t stand having things under her skin.

Then the pulse monitor comes off, and the drone sounds just like the the inside of her head. Flatline. She hears the door of her room open, and someone — a nurse, probably — starts to say, “Agent Romanoff—”

“Turn around,” Natasha orders, without looking up from the gauze she’s putting over the little pinprick of blood from where the IV had been. “Walk away.”

The nurse does. She’s probably been briefed.

Natasha lets the monitor keep droning. She snatches up the clipboard at the bottom of her bed, glances at the nearest screen for the time. She’s been out for 8 hours. She had a bullet in her thigh. A concussion. She was in and out. She doesn’t remember.  _ She doesn’t remember.  _ She races to fill the gaps before the panic of not knowing swallows her whole.

The chart says that Carter brought her in to Medical. Probably carried her out of that base while she was unconscious. Put her hands on Natasha’s skin while Natasha wasn’t there to allow it. Someone put her in a machine to make sure that she wasn’t going to be a vegetable. She doesn’t remember. They took the bullet out of her leg. She doesn’t remember. Someone talked her into anesthesia, and she was unconscious for most of it. A mercy, for some. Not for her.

Natasha has that old familiar feeling (familiar from when?), like she’s separate from her own body. Not  _ outside _ it, no. That would be a kindness, and she’s never gotten much of that. No, it’s like there’s a very small Natasha who lives inside the larger house of her body, but it isn’t  _ her _ house, and someone has been going through room by room, examining the contents. Cleaning, maybe. A benevolent invasion is still an invasion. 

Natasha doesn’t know which is worse: being manhandled while unconscious, the way whole swathes of the evening are gone from her memory (which makes her skin prickle and twitch with a thousand forgotten forgettings), or that she  _ doesn’t know whether they completed the mission. _

Breathe. It’s that last one, probably. She hates nothing more than unprofessionalism. 

She puts down the chart. She listens to the drone of the disconnected heart monitor. She breathes in through her nose. She breathes out through her nose. 

She’s going to get out of this place. She’s going to read her debrief.

And then she’s going to find Margaret Elizabeth Carter and  _ fucking murder her.  _

 

* * *

 

It takes her an hour to con them into releasing her from Medical. She reads the briefing from yesterday’s mission to calm herself. 

It’s not very calming.

She’s still limping when she goes to find the one she has decided is responsible for putting her in Medical. 

Captain Margaret Elizabeth Carter is whaling on one of the special reinforced punching bags for superheroes with anger management issues. She’s the only one in the gym and Natasha can see why -- it’s very intimidating to share a gym with a superhero.

She’s got a very particular style of punching things, keeping her weight low and getting in close so she can use her elbows as well. And she’s  _ fast, _ like Natasha, but unlike Natasha, she doesn’t have to be smart about how she punches. She just  _ punches _ . Her loose, bright blue shorts and the red tank top shift and bounce as she pummels the bag with very little finesse. 

And then, with no warning at all, she goes  _ even faster _ . The bag creaks dangerously on its hook. Her fists blur and her teeth are gritted and Natasha’s feelings send another incoherent telegram about wanting to make Carter her punching bag or be the punching bag or both or at least bite down really really hard on Carter’s trapezius muscle.

_ Because I’m furious with her, _ Natasha decides.

“Hey!” she barks, and has the satisfaction of seeing Carter jump back from the bag, startled out of her rhythm. She looks around. Her eyes fix on Natasha and go wide.

Natasha stalks — or rather, limps closer. “What the hell was that yesterday?”

Carter scowls and turns back to the punching bag, starting up again. Jab, jab, right hook, left hook, one-two punch. “Didn’t you read the debrief?” She doesn’t even sound winded,  _ damn her. _

Natasha raises her voice, undeterred. “Of course I read the debrief.” She had to read the debrief because otherwise she wouldn’t have known what happened after a goon got in a lucky hit and left her unconscious with a bullet in her thigh.

Carter doesn’t so much as glance up from the punching bag. “Then you know the objective was secured, so what’s the problem?”

Real anger flares bright in Natasha’s chest.  _ I woke up in Medical, that’s the problem. _ She hates that moment of breathless helpless raw panic she feels when she wakes up in a hospital bed. The only thing she hates more is feeling  _ incompetent _ which she  _ does _ because maybe they secured the objective but that doesn’t mean the mission went perfectly. It  _ didn’t _ go perfectly, and she’s nothing if not a perfectionist. The only thing she hates more than that is when  _ someone else fucks up her mission. _

“Why didn’t you stay with the assault team?” Natasha says, loud over the sound of Carter’s fists hitting the bag like bullets hitting sand. “Infiltration is  _ my _ job, not yours.”

Carter says nothing, just lowers her center of mass and punches faster. 

Natasha takes a painful step closer. “You do understand how this works, right? If you’re on the ground with me, who’s gonna call in the assault team to save our asses?  _ My _ ass?”

Carter brings a knee up into the bag, spins to slap a backhanded blow that sends the bag careening sideways, groaning on its chain.

“I know it’s  _ fun—” _ Natasha draws the word out snidely, “—to charge in shield-first and half-cocked, but I need someone hanging back with the assault team who can make the call!” Natasha says, voice rising to a shout. “That’s  _ your _ job,  _ Captain.” _

Peggy hops back from the bag and charges in; she throws her full weight behind a front kick that knocks the bag off it’s chain and halfway across the room like a battering ram taking down a door.

She whirls on Natasha then, stance wide and hands still clenched in fists, loose hair sticking to her forehead. She looks ready to tear Natasha apart with her teeth. 

_ “That’s not my job!” _ she bellows. “That was  _ never _ my job, that was  _ Steve’s _ job.”

The gym is silent except for the quiet hiss of sand escaping the bag.

“Who the hell is Steve?” Natasha says.

Carter looks like there's a knife in her ribs somewhere and she's trying not to say a word about it.

Natasha has to rewind, to flip through her mental file on Captain Carter and the Howling Commandos. Barnes, Cartinelli, Dernier, Dugan, Falsworth, Jones, Lorraine, Morita, Proctor, Roberts, Rogers…  _ Steve _ Rogers. From the Wall of Valour at SHIELD HQ, along with James Barnes. “The artist? Your propaganda guy?”

Carter swallows and looks down. She takes in a breath and lets it out, slow and shuddering. She starts plucking at the tape on her hands. She swallows again, jaw clenched tight. There’s something going on here that Natasha doesn’t understand and she wants to. She needs to.

“Peggy?” she prompts, making her voice as gentle as she can, given that she’s still  _ her. _

“He wasn’t just a propaganda guy.” It comes out fast, the words toppling over each other like spilled marbles. “He had the sharpest, most brilliant tactical mind I’ve ever seen. He could look at a map and just…”

Her hands are shaking. How long has she been going at that punching bag? Was she in here all night?

“He’d go with the infil team in advance to scope out the area and then hang back with our sniper to call shots. I was too... useful. As a tactical asset. They needed me on the ground. He was…” She trails off.

He was definitely something. Natasha’s stomach twists. 

Carter looks up, face composed but eyes red. She pulls her mouth to one side. She’s not wearing lipstick, Natasha notices. She opens her mouth, then closes it, then opens it again. She huffs, looks up at the ceiling and shakes her head at herself. “I’m sorry. Turns out I don’t know how to do this without my team.”

“You have a team,” Natasha insists.

“They’re not  _ my _ team.” She goes back to pulling at the tape on her knuckles. “I feel like I’ve lost a limb. Like I’m blind but no one knows that, and now they’re all expecting me to…” She shakes her head violently. “I shouldn’t have asked for a partner. I should’ve gone back to working alone.”

“You couldn’t have pulled this mission off on your own,” Natasha says. “You’re not that good with computers. And everyone needs backup.”

“You wouldn’t have been hurt if I’d gone in alone,” Peggy points out, and looks to where there are bandages packed around Natasha’s thigh. Her face does something complicated. 

Natasha scowls. “No, you’d have failed the mission if you’d gone in alone. Could’ve gotten yourself killed in the process, who knows.” 

Carter rolls her eyes. “I’m hard to kill, thank you very much."

“So am I,” Natasha counters. 

“Are you?” Peggy says it with a dollop of British aloofness that feels heavy-handed and overdone. An act, Natasha thinks. “Are you  _ really?” _

Natasha bares her teeth. “Try me.”

For a moment Peggy looks like she might; tension building in her shoulders. 

But Natasha knows how to sneak in a punch before her opponent knows what’s hit them, how to knock them off balance before they can build a rhythm. Sometimes it’s not about guns, and sometimes a punch is a punch even when there are no fists involved.

“We fucked up,” Natasha says, sharp and brutal, cutting straight to the point. “I know you hate that at least as much as I do.”

Carter’s eye twitches and she clenches her fists. They’re bruised, despite the wrappings, but they’ll heal soon enough.  _ Damn her.  _ “I don’t like it when my people get hurt.”

“That’s really convenient for me, because if you put me in Medical again, I’ll find a way to kill you.”

“Good luck with that,” Carter mutters. 

“So I come back to my original question,” Natasha says. “What the hell happened yesterday?”

Carter laughs. It’s not her usual deep and lovely laugh. It’s thin, hissed out through her teeth. “The same thing that  _ always _ happens. The same thing that  _ keeps _ happening, ever since I woke up. Everyone  _ thinks _ they know me, but I've never been more than what history has created. The Captain. The Supersoldier.  _ Lady Liberty.” _ She throws the wrappings from her hands into her gym bag. 

Natasha watches with her lips pressed tight together. She knows something about what it’s like when someone assumes you’re something that you aren’t. “Clearly we don’t know enough about each other to work together effectively.”

“I should say so.”

“Glad we’re agreed. Let’s rectify that. Meet at my place then, tomorrow at 1400. Bring your files.”

Carter frowns. “Files… My mission reports? All of them?”

“Before the war and during. I already know everything that isn’t ancient history.”

“I don’t think I can get clearance by 1400 tomorrow,” Peggy points out. She doesn’t look particularly bothered by it, though.

Natasha gives her a withering look and turns away. As she limps out of the gym, she calls over her shoulder: “Then don’t get clearance. I didn’t when I took my files.” She just took them and replaced them with dummy files before anyone noticed they were gone. She trusts Peggy to come up with something.

 

* * *

 

Later, she finds out that  _ what Peggy came up with _ was to walk in, pick up the box, and walk out. 

Seems like no one really wants to tell Lady Liberty that she isn’t allowed to do something.

 

 

 

 

 


	7. Caught Cold

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains the bulk of the references to the past Peggy/Steve.

 

 

 

Natasha hates being at her actual apartment when she’s injured. She would much rather be in a safehouse where she can hunker down, lock the door, and rest easy in the knowledge that no one knows where she is.

But she’s got homework to do. With Carter. So here she is, in the apartment SHIELD has on file as her legal residence, awkwardly digging around under her bed for the box where she keeps her paper files. Her bad leg twinges and she swears. She braces her good leg against the bed and pulls harder.

The box comes free and slides out with a hiss of cardboard on hardwood. It’s a bulky, plain brown box labeled _off-season clothes_ in her own messy scrawl _._ She opens it to reveal the modified Starktech safe inside. She enters her Avengers ID and a second, much longer passcode into the keypad, and opens it up. Boxes within boxes, secrets within secrets. Her paranoia never truly shuts up, but she can take steps to make it quieter and that’s not nothing.

She pulls out the only slightly smaller box inside and carries it into the living room. She thumps it down in front of the sofa. The black box and shiny SHIELD logo on the lid look incongruous against the worn trunk that serves as her coffee table (and hides her gun safe.) She chucks the lid off and flicks through until she finds her intake paperwork and sets it on top.

With all that done, she flops on the couch and waits for Carter to get there.

Sadly, she only manages a ten minute catnap before her phone pings to alert her that someone’s coming and shows her a clip from a hacked CCTV camera next door. The camera shows Carter opening the door to the apartment building. Moments later Natasha hears a knock on the door.

She gets up and limps over to let Carter in, and then has to take a moment to take it all in. She’s incognito — it occurs to Natasha that by dressing like a natural born Dita Von Teese nine times out of ten, on the tenth time she’s practically invisible. Today she’s in a slouchy grey shirt and equally slouchy jeans, with her hair straight and loosely up in a sloppy bun on top of her head. She’s wearing a hoodie two sizes too big, which hides the muscles in her arms. No lipstick today. She looks like someone’s overworked mom. She’s wearing _sneakers._

This is the costume, Natasha knows.

Also, she’s got a box balanced on her hip. “Hullo.”

Natasha pushes the door open a little wider and puts down the gun she’d drawn on instinct. She waves grandly to the apartment and closes the door behind Carter, locking and locking and locking it. Can’t have too many locks.

“Nice place,” Peggy says.

Natasha looks around at her place absently. Of course Peggy _would_ like it. It’s a well-worn pre-war apartment with battered wood floors that make Natasha think of dance studios. The furniture is mostly used, because no one questions when you buy used furniture with cash.  Natasha herself had picked it out without much thought. “Thanks,” she says, and leads Peggy along into the living room. Sun filters in through the sheer curtains and fills the space with soft bright light.

“Making tea,” Natasha declares, because they’re in for the long haul here. “You want?”

“Yes please.” She sets down her files next to Natasha’s on the coffee table. “Why paper, by the way? I thought you were one of those modern women.”

“Anything you look at on a computer can be mined for data. Paper files can’t say what intel you looked at and for how long. Doubly so if you’re looking at paper files they don’t know you have.” She turns on the kettle. “Start with the one on top,” she adds. “Let’s get the worst of it out of the way, hm?”

She hears the shuffle of papers and then steps. She looks over her shoulder to find Carter leaning on the kitchen island. The sweater has been abandoned, and the fact that she’s a supersoldier is, once more, painfully obvious in the curve of her biceps. Wiry muscle — softened somewhat since Natasha first saw her. She’s not _going soft,_ Natasha knows that much from watching her demolish that punching bag the other day. She’s just acquired a layer of modern comfort over her 1940s functionality. She holds up the file. “Are you sure you want me to read this?”

Natasha rolls her eyes. “It’s just my _file._ It’s stuff you should’ve already read anyway.” She looks back at the kettle, goes up on her toes to grab two mugs and then immediately regrets it. “Think of it as my spy Tinder profile.”

Peggy scoffs and something thumps down on the counter. “Well. If you’re showing me yours, I’ll show you mine.”

Natasha looks back to the kitchen island and finds a very old file sitting there, fat and tied shut with string. While the water boils, she leans on the island and unwinds the string holding it shut. Inside is Agent Carter’s original SSR file, detailing why she was chosen for the mission, her background info, and so on. Some of it was in the briefing Natasha got when they found Carter in the ice last year. The gist of it, at least. Codebreaker to undercover agent to supersoldier to hero to popsicle. This file fills in the gaps, fleshes out the details. For example: born April 9, 1921.

Natasha frowns.

So. Joined the military at _16._ Codebreaker by 18. Field work at 19. Supersoldier by 22. Dead by 24.

_Bozhe moi._

Natasha drums her fingers on the paper and thinks. She knows better than most that growing up isn’t so much a matter of _years_ as it is _experience_ but at the same time…

“Peggy,” Natasha says. “How old _are_ you, actually?”

“92,” Peggy says without looking up from where she’s studying Natasha’s file. “How old are _you?”_

“Fucked if I know,” Natasha says. “Thirtyish?”

They keep reading in silence.

Natasha reads about Peggy Carter, age 19 -- and there’s a note here, about a dead brother, a broken engagement, a long assignment behind enemy lines. She came out a year later with Abraham Erskine in tow, and then stayed at his side while he worked to recreate his serum underneath Brooklyn. The file ends with a signed recommendation from one Colonel Chester Phillips, suggesting that she be _Test Subject Alpha_ for Project Rebirth.

Natasha flips the file closed and pours water over the teabags. “You want anything in yours?” she asks.

“Just tea,” Peggy calls back. She sounds distracted. “I can see why you don’t mind showing me this,” she adds. “Not much here.”

“There’s stuff that isn’t in there,” Natasha says. _São Paulo. The hospital fire. Drakov’s daughter._ She puts a spoonful of cherry jam in her tea. “A lot of it’s speculation. Mostly, I don’t remember.” She heaves an overdramatic sigh. “Brainwashing, you know.”

“Oh, that old chestnut?” Peggy mutters.

Natasha tucks Peggy’s file under her arms and shuffles back to the couch with their tea mugs. She hands one to Peggy, who takes it with a murmured thank you. She’s still frowning at Natasha’s intake file. “Clint vouched for you?”

“So did Fury.”

Peggy nods slowly. She closes the file and sets it back on top of the box. “Alright.”

“You wanna get into the rest of it?” Natasha asks.

Peggy hooks her own file box closer and starts pulling out files. “Clint and Fury’s word is good enough for me,” she says. “And since I actually _have_ a past, probably makes more sense to focus on that, doesn’t it?”

“Noble as the sentiment is, Cap,” Natasha says, pulling her box back and pushing it at Peggy. “Do your homework and I’ll do mine.”

 

An hour later, Natasha is resting her leg up on the coffee table and reading, raptly, about Carter’s 1944 rampage across Europe with the Howling Commandos. “Two questions,” she says, without looking up from the file.

“I shall be happy to furnish you with answers,” Peggy says primly.

Natasha chuckles. “Okay. What happened between Fort de Queuleu and Resia? The reports kind of dry up in there.”

“Oh, that,” Peggy says, very lightly. “Steve got shot, and we got bogged down waiting for him to recover enough to meet up with the other commando unit at Resia. Had to push the rendezvous back twice.” She taps one blunt nail against the rim of her mug, marking out a short, sharp rhythm.

“Okay,” Natasha says, filing away the tidbit that Carter has told her some but not all of the truth here. “So how did it work? He was the brains and you were the brawn?”

Carter scoffs. “Hardly. It wasn’t _that_ simplistic. He had…” She pauses, puts down the file she’s reading, and contemplates Natasha’s ceiling for a moment. “The mind of a soldier trapped in the body of a spy.”

Natasha shuffles pages and comes up with the brief on Rogers, Steven Grant. He’s glaring out at the camera like it’s taking his mugshot. Natasha can see what she means: he’d be easy to overlook. He’s a little guy, all angles and drawn down brows and a serious little frown. The phrase “skin and bone” springs to mind, but even in battered sepia there’s something intense about his gaze. It’s one of those photos that looks back at you.

Mind of a soldier in the body of a spy.

“And you had the reverse,” Natasha guesses.

“Okay, so it was a little simplistic,” Peggy allows. She reaches a hand out for the file like she’s about to look over her own death sentence but she smiles softly when she lays eyes on Steve’s face, glaring up at her from the page. “We had… complementary styles.”

“Complementary, huh?” Natasha says.

The smile reaches the corners of her eyes and makes wrinkles. “We argued a lot. He was a good man, Steve Rogers. Had a way of seeing the world as it should be, as it _ought_ to be. Made all of us want to be better people, even Howard. But he was not an easy man to negotiate with. Behind enemy lines is not the best place to have a screaming match, but we managed. He always wanted to do the good thing, and I always wanted to do the smart thing, and neither of those are inherently the right thing, but we usually got there in the end.” She sounds desperately fond, and just as desperately sad. “When it came right down to it, we could practically read each other’s minds.”

“Huh,” Natasha says aloud, without meaning to.

Peggy looks up. She quickly hands the sheet back. “It was a long time ago.”

_Not for you,_ Natasha notes, silently and clinically, with something uncomfortably like grief grabbing her guts and twisting. Gross.

“I’ve got a question for you,” Peggy says, quick and light, like a fencer’s riposte. She picks up the file summarizing kills attributed to the Black Widow before she joined SHIELD. “How much do you _really_ remember?” One eyebrow goes up like a victory flag.

Natasha smiles and nods, making the mental note that she’s not the only one in this room who can tell when the other isn’t telling the whole truth. “Alright, you got me. I remember more than I say in there.”

“How much more?”

“Too much more,” Natasha says, without heat. “Some memories that probably should be there are just gone. Others are pretty clearly fake. I remember, for example,” she nods to the file, her kill list, “the Ivanovich assassination, which is probably real, since he’s _dead_ and all. But I also remember the Battle of Stalingrad and I think we can say with confidence that I wasn’t there.”

“I was,” Peggy points out. Natasha gives her a look. “No, you’re right, I’m only joking,” Peggy says a beat later. “I was in New York getting injected with blue steroids at the time.” She looks at Natasha over the top of the file like she’s looking over glasses as well, even though her stupid, perfect brown eyes have perfect vision. “Life is occasionally stranger than fiction.”

Natasha lets a slow smile slither onto her face. Carter thinks she can redirect this interrogation. She’s wrong.  “You’re not as subtle as you think you are.”

“I don’t think anyone’s accused me of being subtle since 1943. The girl who wears the Union Jack colors and calls herself Lady Liberty—”

“What _really_ happened between Queuleu and Resia?”

Carter sighs and looks down. “Like a dog with a bone.”

“No one’s ever accused me of not being tenacious.”

Carter nods, looking down at the file in her hand. She closes it and sets it aside. “It’s not relevant to our work,” she says, firmly. “All of this,” she waves a hand at their file boxes. “I understand. If we’re going to be partners, we need to know how the other thinks. Right?”

“It’s this or couple’s counseling,” Natasha agrees.

“What happened with Steve... it was very unprofessional of me, but it was… extraordinary circumstances.” She winces, like she knows how that sounds. “I know that the extraordinary is our normal. That’s not an excuse, it’s just… Trust me. _That,”_ she nods to the file on Steve, “isn’t relevant to _this._ Our professional relationship here, I mean.”

Natasha nods, and makes her face be as still as it always prefers to be. She shrugs. “That’s fine, you don’t have to tell me, I just—”

“So when I tell you this,” Peggy continues. “I want you to understand that I’m telling you because I consider you a friend.”

Natasha blinks, but Carter has already barrelled on, diving into the story.

“We barely got out of Fort de Queuleu with half a HYDRA battalion on our tails and we ran — and I do mean _ran_ — all the way to the next rendezvous. Our contact had this absolutely ridiculous little puddle jumper from the last war that shouldn’t have been able to fly at all. Not like we had much choice. We all pile in — some of us _on the wings,_ with _no parachutes to speak of._ But we made it, flying all night, and we get to the _next_ rendezvous, near the Resia Pass, where we're supposed to join up with the main commando group and take the HYDRA facility there. No one thought we'd make it that far, to be honest. No one thought we’d make it as far as _Queuleu_. Command wanted me out of the way, so they’d given me this suicide run. Gravelines to Metz to Resia. It was supposed to be impossible. But I thought: oh, I’ll show them.”

The bitterness in her voice is palpable. She puts her head back and stares at something that isn’t actually Natasha’s ceiling. Natasha stares at the line of her neck, the muscle working in her jaw.

“So, anyway. Our mad pilot lands the ridiculous plane and I uncramp myself from the belly and stand up and there’s… paradise. It was gorgeous; the night sky above, and the flat stretch of the green valley nestled between the mountains. The lake looked like it was full of stars. All the stars up there, caught like so many dropped diamonds in this lake in the middle of nowhere. Heavenly.” She swallows, her throat bobbing. “And I thought: by God, we’re really going to do it aren’t we? France, Austria, Italy. Every objective achieved and not a single man down.”

She takes a deep breath. “And then we realize that Steve’s unconscious in the back of the plane, in a pool of his own blood, because he was too stubborn to say that he’d got winged coming out of Fort de Queuleu.”

Natasha frowns. “But—”

“Oh he didn’t die _then,”_ Peggy says. “Not _then.”_ And Natasha suspects it’s a testament to Peggy’s strength that her voice doesn’t even quaver. “Not because of his own hubris.” Her hand goes to her throat, then frowns, like she’s remembering something. She reaches down, into the pocket of her jeans, fishing around absently as she keeps telling her story.

“So we took him to the — the little church nearby, since the monastery was all overrun with HYDRA. And we all thought he was going to die. He should never have been there in the first place, and he was dying, and he and I were... Well. We were something, anyway.”

She looks over at Natasha, levelly, and tosses. Natasha catches on instinct, and looks down to see a pair of dog tags there.

Rogers, Steven Grant.

“We didn’t have rings or anything, you see,” Peggy says.

“Oh,” Natasha says, frowning at the tags in her hand. She can’t even be angry about it. She’s too surprised. It’s so… sweet. She’d known, of course, that Peggy was from the forties, but somehow that didn’t fully translate. Of course, when one thinks of WWII, one thinks of war brides, of reckless lovers separated by circumstance. _We’ll always have Paris._ That kind of thing.

“It was all terribly melodramatic of us, I suppose. But we were young. So young. And it was war, and he was dying. I thought.” She sounds very tired, all of a sudden. “And then he didn’t die. I wasn’t sorry.” She smiles again, a wistful echo of a happier smile. “Not about any of it. The unprofessionalism, the melodrama, the sheer goddamned _stupidity._ I didn’t — I _don’t_ regret a minute of it. No rings, no dress, and the only honeymoon we ever got was behind enemy lines.”

Natasha frowns a little, trying to process, still turning the dog tags over in her hand. It’s just that she never connected _Peggy_ to that kind of story. It was too... Sweet. Bittersweet, but also unbearably naïve. It was a story that ended in tears. A story for victims, not victors.

Natasha should know better than to think that you can’t be both.

“I don’t think he would’ve held me to it, after the war,” Peggy goes on. “Good Catholic boy like him — well. _A_ Catholic boy. But I think he would’ve let me go if I wanted. Pretended it wasn’t a real marriage, never really happened. Not that I would’ve let him out, not in a million years. Till death and all that.”

Natasha runs a thumb across the name, this man dead long before she was born, who had meant so much, and had been forgotten.

Death had come, Natasha knows, as Death always does, in the end. First it had come for Rogers, and with him, Barnes. That mission in the Alps, the train job. And then Carter had gone out to meet Death face to face, and Death had sent her back.

Natasha considers all of this for a moment, and observes that the grief that took root in her guts earlier is now a full-grown tree: gnarled and twisted, with roots that go deep. Regrettable.

She leans over and takes Peggy’s wrist delicately between her fingers. Like Natasha’s, Peggy’s nails are short and neatly trimmed. Natasha rubs the smudge of a stubborn, still-healing bruise on Peggy’s rough knuckles and then turns her hand over. She wordlessly presses the dog tags into Peggy’s palm and curls Peggy’s fingers around them. She squeezes, once. It's an offer of unspoken support and sympathy, one widow to another.

“I’m gonna make more tea,” she says. Because hell. Sometimes that’s all you can say.

“Do you have honey?” Peggy asks.

“From this place where the bees only eat lime flowers,” Natasha says, because she likes nice things, and also limes. “It’s divine.”

“I’ll have honey in mine.”

“We’ll have more tea, and then I want you to walk me through exactly how you took the radar station at Gravelines, and I’ll walk you through the shitshow in Budapest with Clint.”

 

 

 

 

 


	8. Fringe Contender

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More ART! from esaael this chapter: THIS, by the way, was the piece that caught my imagination and was my first choice for the RBB.

 

 

 

Natasha is back on her feet before long. The SHIELD PT lady clears her with the usual amount of griping and eye rolling and demands that she get _just one more round of blood tests, just in case we missed something._ Which, _fat chance, SHIELD PT lady._ But once she’s got her clean bill of health, she and Carter can graduate from talking strategy to sparring together.

Carter’s already in the gym, warming up on a punching bag — the same punching bag she broke the other day, judging by the copious duct tape and the shiny new reinforced hook that it hangs from. She steps back from the bag when Natasha comes in, and her eyebrows come down. “They really cleared you?”

“They really did,” Natasha says, pulling up the hem of her black gym shorts to show the healed-over bullet wound. Carter’s brows go up and Natasha pulls the hem back down to cover the new scar and still-healing skin.

“So have you got something on the PT Lady or…”

Natasha gives Peggy a withering little look. “If I had something on the PT Lady I wouldn’t use it to get out of PT, I’m not _Clint.”_ She tosses her bag aside and drops to the floor to start stretching, her body falling into the rhythm of it easily. “PT is important for optimal functionality,” she adds, letting her voice go a little Russian on the r’s and a’s. She drops the Boris and Natasha act and winks at Peggy. “If I had something on the PT Lady I’d use it to get access to sensitive medical information.”

Peggy lets out a startled laugh.

Natasha grins. “Nah, I’m messing with you.” She lets the grin drop from her face. “Or am I?”

Peggy rolls her eyes, clearly unbothered. “Anyway. I thought you weren’t enhanced.”

Natasha twists around to pull her ankle up to her hip. Her thigh twinges, but only a little. “I’m not,” she says, tone flattening out because she knows what’s coming next.

A gently scoffing laugh. “Yeah right.”

Natasha straightens, pulls her arm around behind her head, folds herself into another pretzel, feeling the warm pull in her triceps, her shoulders. “I heal fast. I’ve had lots of practice.”

“That really isn’t how healing works.”

Natasha sighs, because she _knows that._

“You’re sure you don’t have… I don’t know, some kind of serum derivative?”

Natasha twists around and peers at Peggy, one eye squeezed shut. “If I did, wouldn’t I be taller?”

Peggy looks away and goes back to the punching bag, bouncing a little on the balls of her feet and hitting it with fast, light blows. “It affects everyone differently. I mean, look at the Red Skull. I got pretty much the same stuff he did, it didn’t give me the world’s worst sunburn, did it. Who knows what it might do to someone like you.”

Natasha knows. Or, well, she doesn’t, not for sure, but she knows the ugly black inside of her own head and she’s fairly confident that if she’d been given any kind of serum at all, she’d be more obviously… herself. She doesn’t say that, though. Instead she says: “When I came into SHIELD they took enough blood to start a bank. If I had any kind of serum derivative, they’d know.”

Peggy’s fists stop thumping against the bag. Natasha unfolds from her stretch. Their eyes meet and Peggy says: “You’re sure they’d tell you?”

Natasha gives her a slow smile. “It’s cute that you think I’d wait for them to _tell me._ Why do you think I got something on the PT Lady?”

She has the pleasure of hearing Peggy laugh again.

“Come on, let’s do this,” Natasha says, grabbing tape from her bag.

 

They meet in the ring and bump fists; a boxer’s handshake of Peggy’s wrapped knuckles to Natasha’s. Natasha bounces back and they start to circle each other.

“I’m not going to hit you with my full strength and that’s not negotiable,” Peggy says.

“I won’t argue with that,” Natasha says. “I hear you collapsed a Nazi’s ribcage with one punch outside Rouen.” It’s idly said, but it’s the first blow of this session whether Peggy knows it or not.

The Captain doesn’t flinch, though. She grins. “That’s an unsubstantiated rumor from the trenches. And I used the shield, not my knuckles.” She isn’t bouncing or ducking or weaving, just slowly circling, closing the distance. It’s predatory, and liquid, and it doesn’t give anything away. She makes a _come on_ gesture with her fists.

 

Natasha obliges, circling close enough to throw a few jabs. Carter blocks and strikes back faster than Natasha would’ve expected from a brute-force powerhouse. Of course, the Black Widow’s reflexes are good enough to match Carter’s speed, ducking quick under the blow and sweeping out with a high spinning kick. Cа́мбо was Natasha’s first fighting style, and it’s still her fallback when all else goes wrong, so she goes for a lock around Carter’s waist, intending to throw her to the ground.

It works, and Carter’s back hits the mat with a thump, but she keeps rolling, and Natasha has to disengage lightning fast to avoid getting pinned herself. She bounces back up to her feet and finds Carter already there, grinning, fists raised.

“Nice,” Peggy says.

“Thanks—” and without warning Natasha ducks under Peggy’s defense to aim a blow at her gut. Peggy catches the blow and boops Natasha’s nose. Natasha ducks into the hold and uses it to swing herself up, get her thigh up and over Carter’s shoulder, but Carter easily transfers the momentum and sends Natasha rolling across the mat.

Natasha lands in a crouch, one arm out, fingers brushing the mat, cat-like. She grins. “I don’t know why I thought you’d fight like a boxer.”

Peggy brings her fists up and shakes them out, puts up a classic boxer’s guard. “Well I can if you like, but I’m a little rusty on the Queensbury rules.”

Natasha comes up to meet her in the middle of the ring and finds herself pushed back by a flurry of lightning quick punches. Natasha’s stuck on the defensive, blocking.

She knows this dance, though. She smacks Carter’s fists aside and goes for a spinning back kick to get herself some ground before her back can hit the ropes. She turns and aims a sharp kick at Carter’s knee, forcing the taller woman back again, then ducks under a haymaker to bring her knee up into Carter’s sternum.

It’s a bit like putting her knee into a padded wall, but Carter staggers back a couple of steps. Natasha’s starting to work up a sweat, and even Carter looks warm, but there’s no way that Natasha’s stamina can overcome that serum-granted endurance.

Carter regains her stance, puts her chin down. Those brown eyes narrow. Natasha can _see_ it, the way Carter’s focus is zeroing in, blocking out the rest of the gym, all distractions. For Carter, now, there is only Natasha, and Natasha’s fists, and her next move.

Natasha never allows herself to focus that narrowly. It’s a tactical mistake. It blocks out the environment, and the environment is just another weapon to use.

She punches out a short, sharp breath, sucks in another.

Time slows to a slurry in her head.

Carter feints to the right and swings from the left. Natasha spins away from it, turns her back just briefly. Three running steps and she’s at the corner of the ring. She digs her toes into the padded post — left, right, left — a parkour run that ends with her planting a foot on top of the post and using that momentum to flip herself up and high over Carter’s head. She catches a brief glimpse of Carter’s face, eyes wide with surprise, and knows she’s got her now.

She lands behind, smacks the ground and rolls, then plants her feet and launches herself at Carter’s exposed back. A quick kick to knock her off balance, followed by a spinning crescent kick. She hooks her knee around Carter’s throat and her momentum carries them both to the ground.

She catches Carter’s right arm and locks it close against her chest and with that, the taller woman is facedown on the mat, with Natasha’s leg hooked around her throat and her arm pulled up awkwardly behind. Peggy bucks and tries to reach around with her other arm. Natasha puts her other knee there, just above the back of the elbow to pin it down. She leans back hard, straining against Carter’s arms and pulling her shoulders up off the mat so she can’t get any leverage with those long, powerful legs. Cа́мбо again, that brutal use of thighs and locks and grappling. Submission hold achieved.

And then, with her free hand, Natasha reaches down and boops Peggy’s nose. “Yield?”

She can see the edge of a smile. The red of her lips is stark against her pale skin, the flush high in her cheeks. “I yield.”

Natasha un-pretzels and Peggy rolls free to lie on her back and stare at the ceiling, breathing hard. Natasha gets up and offers Peggy a hand. Her thigh is twinging, and she can feel sweat dripping down between her shoulder blades under her sports bra, but she can also feel the smile on her face. Peggy looks up at her, flushed but not very sweaty, and it occurs to Natasha that this fight probably shouldn’t have gotten Carter breathing all that hard.

Then Carter’s eyes track down Natasha’s body and then back up in a quick flick that…

Huh.

Well _that’s_ interesting. There’s no guilt in that look, just frank admiration. Which — Natasha remembers that Peggy might be from 1945, but she also went to an all-girls’ boarding school, and then was closely associated with the WACs in the war. Just because she was married to a man doesn’t mean that she only ever slept with men. Doesn’t mean she’s only ever been attracted to men.

It’s another shift in the landscape. Another vital piece of intel. Another piece of the puzzle.

Not that Natasha’s got any business doing anything about it, of course. Not that either of them do. Not that either of them _would._ They’re _professionals._

Natasha clears her throat and offers a hand up. Peggy, still grinning, bats it aside and gets up on her own. “Go again?” she says, not doing much to hide her eagerness.

“Sure,” Natasha says, a growing sense of dread in her gut. “Why not.”

 

* * *

 

After a week or so, they progress from basic sparring in the ring to tactical sparring on the obstacle course one level down. The obstacle course training room has low walls and narrow halls and high rafters. There are dark corners and unexpected flash bangs and surprises to keep one on one’s toes. It’s like an extremely high tech laser tag room.

And it’s where Captain Carter really gets to shine.

If it were just a game of spy vs spy, outmaneuvering and outthinking each other, Natasha would probably be able to at least hold her own. But then there’s _fucking_ Carter and her _fucking_ shield.

For the umpteenth time, Natasha hears the _thwang_ of the shield bouncing off something behind her and she dodges left only to have the shield crash into her back and send her flying.

She tries to roll with it, but the thing about _that god damned fucking shield_ is that it isn’t just like getting something thrown at you, it’s like having someone thrown at you, and then right as they’re hitting you, that person also hits you with a hammer you didn’t know they were carrying.

Flat on her face, Natasha bangs her palm against the floor. She’s pretty sure her back is one big bruise under the armor and safety padding. She rolls over and sees Peggy jogging towards her with a shit-eating grin and _that fucking shield_ on her arm, glinting dull red-white-and-blue as the lights come up.

“I hate that thing so much,” Natasha says.

“Now now, no need to be mean.” Peggy hooks the shield into its harness and offers Natasha a hand up. “Come on, let’s go up to the range and toss it around. You can show me how to zap someone with those things without electrocuting myself.”

Natasha’s brows go up a little. “I thought non-enhanced personnel weren’t strong enough to handle the shield?”

Peggy shrugs. “That’s what we told Phillips before they deployed us but. Bucky managed. So did Steve.” She frowns. “It just takes practice. I’ll show you.”

 

Which is how Natasha finds herself one floor down on the open empty space of the target range.

 _It’s just a piece of metal,_ she reminds herself, settling the shield on her arm and trying to remember that she doesn’t have to _feel worthy of it._ It’s not _Thor’s goddamn hammer._

“You’ve got to be firm,” Carter orders. “Here.”  She grabs the rim of the shield and shakes a little. The whole thing wobbles on Natasha’s arm. “I shouldn’t be able to do that. Pull it close. Keep it braced with the off hand if you have to. If you let her get her wiggle on—“

Natasha lets out a snort of laughter.

“That’s it,” Peggy says. “Relax. She won’t bite, you know. Here.” Peggy comes around behind her and Natasha tenses up all over again. “It’s alright. I won’t bite either,” Peggy says conversationally.

Natasha goes still and thinks _not even if I ask nicely?_ But for some reason, she doesn’t say it.

Peggy taps the insides of Natasha’s ankles with her foot and Natasha obligingly widens her stance. Bends her knees when Peggy taps the backs of her thighs. Preens internally when Peggy says “good.” Peggy takes her free hand, presses it flat against the shiny inside of the shield. “There. Feel that?”

“Feel what?” Natasha asks.

She only notices how warm Peggy is when she takes a step and leaves Natasha’s back feeling cold. But then Peggy’s in front of her, rapping her knuckles against the star and—

“Oh—“ the shield comes alive in her hands, humming, tugging like it wants to twist out of her grip. She tightens her stance and the humming gets louder, almost angry.

“Not like that,” Peggy says, crisp like a schoolmarm. “Don’t fight her. You’ll lose. You’ve got to be able to take what she’s giving.”

She knocks on the star again and Natasha presses her free palm flat against the shield but doesn’t tense up. Instead, she lets herself absorb the vibrations without pushing back. It reverberates through her, fills her body, head to toe. Singing.

“Good.”

Peggy steps back three paces and then there’s a _gun_ in her hand and Natasha ducks instinctively. Remembers _not_ to tense up at the last second and—

_BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM._

The sound of the bullets striking the shield rings out loud in her ears, but not as deafening as it _should_ be. It’s absorbed into the metal of the shield, which in turn buzzes against her skin.

She peers cautiously over the rim and finds Carter’s red lips lifted in a smirk.

She… Maybe doesn't hate that lipstick.

“Just like that. Now let’s see if you can bounce it off a wall and catch it without breaking your hand.”

 

* * *

 

Three weeks, one sprained wrist and two fractured pinkies later, Natasha can bounce the shield off _two_ walls and catch it. She’s aware that she doesn’t wield it with the power, grace, or style that Carter does, but she doesn’t care. She doesn’t need _flair_ to take a man’s head off at the shoulders, after all.

Meanwhile, Peggy is trying to get the hang of throwing the Widow’s Bites, since they’re damned useful, but she keeps trying to throw them the way she throws the shield and then they bounce off the target instead of sticking and fizzle sadly on the floor without zapping anyone at all.

They do figure out that Natasha can slap a Bite to the center of the shield, and then it’ll zap the shit out of the next two or three targets it hits.

They set fire to a couple of paper targets that way, and are cackling about it while the air filters kick on to clear the smoke when Fury’s commanding voice draws their attention.

“Captain Carter, Agent Romanoff. Seems to me like you two might be getting a little bored.”

They turn and Carter grins. “We’re very good at keeping ourselves entertained, sir. As you can see.”

“Interested as I am to see what else you can set fire to in our training facilities, how would you two feel about taking a little mission?”

 

 

 

 

 


	9. Sparring Partner

 

 

 

“A little mission” is over almost anticlimactically fast. A little mission becomes a bigger mission, becomes a whole series of missions.

It’s not like Natasha stops working with Clint or anything. Hell, Peggy goes on missions with _Stark_ more than once. He’s trying to cut back on his superheroing while he recovers from surgery, but he still has the best toys and manages to get in the biggest trouble.

They rapidly become SHIELD’s go-to people for the kind of job that wants a twenty-man STRIKE team but only has room for two or three agents, for security reasons. They are superheroes, after all, and hands down the most capable, most flexible tactical team in SHIELD’s bullpen. Unstoppable, unbreakable, unimpeachable. The most trusted.

Their mission reports are, if not the stuff of legend, then at least the stuff that movies are made about. But Natasha and Peggy aren’t just agents of SHIELD; they’re Avengers. The stuff that movies are made of happens to them every day.

What is far more rare, in Natasha’s experience, is the stuff that _doesn’t_ make it into mission reports.

 

* * *

 

Their first mission solo — or duo, rather, just the two of them — goes about as smoothly as any mission can be expected to go. The only flaw in an otherwise perfect plan is that the stakeout takes three times longer than anticipated.

In a fit of intense boredom, trapped in a stolen ("we're borrowing it") car, Natasha burrows into the glovebox and finds an old CD. It's the Moulin Rouge soundtrack.  Explaining the concept of popular songs being recycled into musicals doesn't take as much work as Nat thought. Peggy gets it straightaway. "That's not a modern invention," she says drily.

Too many hours later, they're on their third listen through and about to start belting out "Roxanne" when the target finally arrives and they have to get to work.

 

* * *

 

A few weeks after that, the target they're watching is in the middle of a Lord of the Rings marathon. Peggy and Nat get stuck watching along while they wait.

"That still only counts as one!" Gimli insists.

In their spy nest across the street, Peggy hums dubiously.

Nat gives her an eloquent look.

Peggy shrugs. “I mean, tactically speaking the mûmak was worth more than any one soldier, not to mention that killing it probably took out several other riders that Legolas hadn’t already killed.”

Natasha nods. “Agreed.”

Peggy sighs. “But…”

Something in her tone makes Natasha narrow her eyes and look over suspiciously.

Peggy makes an exaggerated grimace. “I suppose that isn’t fair of me. Taking out the mûmak is something Gimli could never have hoped to accomplish. Unfair to hold him to that kind of standard.”

“You think Gimli couldn’t have taken down a mûmak if he wanted?”

“Well of course not.” Peggy’s glance slides sideways. The corner of her red mouth lifts very slightly. “He’s so short.”

Natasha should have seen that coming but her mouth drops open. “Oh you are _asking_ for it, Carter.”

Carter bites her bottom lip, just briefly, only barely even _trying_ to hold back her smirk.

“You smug bastard,” Natasha hisses. “It is so fucking _on.”_

 

Which leads to Nat and Peggy developing an intensely elaborate points-based system to rate their bad guy takedowns.

“That guy’s worth at least four,” Natasha argues, waving at the hulking baddie twitching on the floor with a Widow’s Bite on his neck.

“I’ll allow it, but since I deflected the bullet that otherwise would’ve stopped you taking him down, I deserve two of the four points.”

 _“One_ of the four points, _tops._ And by that metric you should split the points on Mr. I’ve Got Both My Skorpions in Both My Hands back there.”

“Bullshit!”

“Then give me all four points for Buff McTwitchy here,” Natasha counters.

Carter’s smile is wide. There’s just a little bit of blood on her teeth. Maybe it’s lipstick. Natasha has been wondering whether the lipstick is the super long lasting kind or what because it sure seems to be pretty much tattooed to her face.

Natasha could ask, but then she would have to stop fantasizing about finding out through more practical means. Perhaps by smearing her thumb across Peggy’s full lower lip, or licking the perfect bow of her upper lip.

Carter’s teeth aren’t showing anymore. Her brows have come together in a silent query. A woman who was not Natasha would probably shake herself, maybe rattle off an excuse about zoning out.

Natasha fixes her with a lizardlike, unblinking stare until Peggy looks away.

 

* * *

 

After a few months of working together, Natasha learns to be prepared for the inevitable moment in any mission longer than three hours when Peggy’s stomach starts growling.

The serum needs fuel, just like everything else. They can ignore it when there’s no other choice, but more often than not, Peggy whips out a protein bar or some kind of gross looking smoothie and shoves it unceremoniously into her face.

“M’ _starving,”_ she says, apologetic every time.

Natasha starts carrying them too, just in case. Peggy likes the ones with chocolate in them, but only the really cheap chocolate-flavored ones that taste like chalk to Natasha.

“Reminds me of D Rations,” Peggy explains once, while they’re stuck together on another too-long stakeout. Her expression is strangely wistful.

Peggy, Natasha learns, keeps carrots in her freezer to eat like popsicles when it’s too hot out, and actively prefers the kind of eggs that come in a box. Her palate is utter garbage and she’s very apologetic about eating more than what she considers to be her fair share.

So Natasha makes it her mission to break Peggy of her sad 1945 rationing habits. She orders delicious comfort food and far too much of it and then makes to throw it away. The first few times Peggy watches the perfectly good food go in the trash with her eye twitching. Finally, she starts offering to finish Natasha’s portions.

“You can’t just _let it go to waste,”_ she scolds, scooping charcoal chicken slathered with yellow sauce into her mouth.

That said, once she’s off the leash, Peggy’s serum-fed appetite becomes a god damned menace. More than once, Peggy arranges for an entire large pizza to be waiting for them when they get back, and then proceeds to eat all but two slices while Natasha looks on, grudgingly impressed.

How she manages to do it without smudging lipstick all over her face is just —

Well. It’s not infuriating, not really. Natasha knows. But it’s easier to keep calling it rage than give it a name.

Peggy cocks her head at Natasha with pizza sauce on her chin.

Natasha leans across the table, swipes sauce off Peggy’s chin, pops her finger into her own mouth like some kind of _weird food pervert,_ and then flees the room at a lazy stroll, like a cat that just faceplanted off the couch.

 

* * *

 

They’ve been running missions together for six months, and nine times out of ten, Natasha has no trouble keeping up with Peggy. _Clint_ wouldn’t have trouble. Maria wouldn’t have either. There’s more than one way to be super; Natasha might not have the serum but she’s not quite human either, even if her bloodwork doesn’t show anything. Nine missions out of ten, there’s nothing to remind her that she’s anything less than Peggy’s absolute equal.

And then on the tenth mission something stupid will happen like a tripwire or a waxed floor or whatever it was that made her land wrong and twist her ankle so hard she spends the rest of their run hobbling.

“Don’t you dare,” Natasha hisses, clutching her leg and trying not to do something really undignified like puke because her ankle might actually be broken after all. She hopes to Christ it doesn’t set wrong, not again. Her bones heal a little too fast, like the rest of her.

Peggy has been giving her a calculating look as they take a breather to put in new clips before moving to the next objective. “I didn’t say anything,” she protests.

“You were _thinking,”_  Natasha says, un-gritting her teeth, “of carrying me.”

“I was _thinking,”_ Peggy corrects, “of you riding me.”

Natasha’s dumb lizard brain screams shrilly for 20 seconds. In the meantime, Peggy slams a new clip home before offering the gun to Natasha. Natasha blinks away her internal blue screen of death and takes the offered sidearm.

“Like… piggyback?” she says, uncharacteristically slow between stupid pain and dumb lust.

“We’ve already taken out the cameras and we’re planning to kill everyone who sees us, so.”

Natasha hates to admit that it’s not a bad idea. Even with the lost maneuverability, they’d still be faster on Peggy’s two legs than their collective three and a half.

“If you ever tell anyone,” Natasha starts.

“I like having all my own teeth,” Peggy says primly, and then turns her back so Natasha can hop on.

 

During the actual firefight it isn’t so bad. The sheer absurdity of Lady Liberty with the Black Widow riding her Yoda-style is enough to make more than one gunman freeze, stare agape, and lower his weapon. Natasha shoots over Peggy’s shoulders, and Peggy covers them both as best she can with the shield.

But then, when the building is quiet and they’re just steadily walking to the extraction point, the moment when Natasha really _ought_ to get down off Peggy’s back — she doesn’t. Her ankle is throbbing in time with every step and jostle, and the adrenaline is draining out of her now, making her ache all over.

Instead, she lets her arms relax, staying looped around Peggy’s broad shoulders, near-empty pistols dangling down. Peggy wordlessly hooks her hands under Natasha’s thighs so she can relax more. The shield is still on her arm, its edges digging into Natasha’s leg, but she doesn’t mind. Natasha lets go some of her tension and lets her forehead drop into the space between her own bicep and Peggy’s neck. Peggy is so _warm._ Natasha wants to somehow curl up in that warmth like a cat in a beam of sunlight. She sighs.

She might be wrong, but she thinks she can feel Peggy shiver.

 

* * *

 

While Nat is laid up with a bum ankle for a week (it was broken, but luckily didn’t have time to set badly) Peggy comes to visit. She makes a lot of tea and cooks under-seasoned food. She complains about work. Natasha complains about Clint. Peggy complains about Tony. Natasha makes Peggy sit through some key cultural touchstones she missed over the last 70 years.

Peggy tackles each new thing with the same stolid determination and deliberate attentiveness that she uses to get through mission briefs. She’s got a little black notebook that she uses just exactly the way that someone else might use their phone. She doodles in it when the film is boring, the way someone else might scroll through their social media feed. She makes notes of things she doesn’t understand and wants to look up later, where someone from this century might go ahead and Google it right away.

On the third day of Natasha's convalescence, she plots a Film Journey Back In Time. It’s extremely ha-ha funny. They start with Back to the Future, and then from the imaginary 50s of Spielberg they jump to the real life fifties masquerading as the twenties in Singing in the Rain. Natasha is planning to end the evening with the first Star Wars movie — _a long time ago in a galaxy far far away_ — but then they get to Singing in the Rain. For whatever reason, it apparently clicks hard in Peggy’s brain. Natasha, without actually looking at Peggy, notices the moment that she puts down the notepad.

She frowns and leans in, eyes fixed hard on the screen as the trio dances their way through _Good Morning!_ in perfect synchronization after staying up all night to come up with their plan to save The Dueling Cavalier. At the end of the movie, when Don Lockwood calls out “She’s the real star!” and then moments later bursts into _You Are My Lucky Star_ while his best friend leads the orchestra for them…

“Earth to Carter,” Natahsa says, as the end credits roll.

Carter looks over, eyes wide and a little bright. She smiles. “Fine.”

“Ruble for your thoughts, comrade.”

She likes to go Extra Corny Russian on occasion. It makes Peggy laugh. It does now; her small smile widening into a broader one. She ducks her head, shakes it a little then leans back. Her smile is easy: not at all the strained thing it so often was in the early days, but also not the big ferocious grin Natasha sometimes sees in a firefight or a sparring session. It’s a quiet smile, a little honest, modest smile.

“The boys — Steve and Bucky, that is — wanted to go out west if we all made it through,” Peggy says, tipping her head back. “See the Grand Canyon. Barnes always joked about trying his luck in Hollywood. Lucky Bucky Barnes. He had the look.”

Natasha’s seen pictures, she knows. “And Rogers?”

“My secret weapon,” Peggy says. “Running a West Coast office for the SSR maybe. I don’t know. It was all pretty vague, after the whole ‘see the Grand Canyon’ phase of things.”

Natasha suddenly remembers a cramped air vent, a picture of the Canyon at the golden hour, laid out before her through a phone screen. It clicks at last.

“Wish you were here,” Natasha says, neutrally, quoting that long-ago text.

Peggy’s expression turns rueful, a little self-deprecating. “I wasn’t expecting to be there alone, you know?”

“I’m sorry,” Natasha says, since it’s not like she can get up and make tea this time.

Peggy frowns, like she’s thinking about it. “I’m not.”

“No?” Natasha says.

“Well it isn’t like I was terribly _excited_ to come back from the Western Front only to have to fight a whole _other_ war, this time where I couldn’t use my fists.”

It’s not the first time Peggy’s alluded to the bullshit she had to put up with back then. It isn’t as though sexism is _over_ or anything, but it’s certainly different these days. “They never let you speak in the propaganda films,” Natasha observes.

“Oh, I spoke all the time, they just never got any usable soundbites from me,” Peggy says. “I suppose it’s just… I miss the _people,_ but now that I’m here? I don’t mind having missed the years in between, you know?”

Something about that statement pings around in the back of Natasha’s head. Something about _missing the years in between_ makes her think about her own past, that jumbled mess of fractured perfect recollections and nearly-perfect forgeries. They’re both missing the years in between, in different ways. She thinks she does miss the people, maybe. Some of them. The ones who might not even exist. The partners whose faces are gone forever. Spartacus dancing in his chains. The boy with the blue eyes. A body on a slab.

“Yeah,” Natasha says. “I think I do know.”

Peggy’s toes worm under Natasha’s thigh and wiggle. Natasha’s foot is up on the coffee table, next to the empty popcorn bowl. She looks over and finds Peggy smiling at her in the here and now. She thinks: _If I had to miss all that to get here, I’m maybe okay with it._

And she thinks Peggy is maybe thinking exactly the same thing.

Different and just the same, as per usual.

“So what’s next?” Peggy asks.

“A New Hope,” Natasha answers automatically.

“I’ll make popcorn,” Peggy says.

“Don’t burn it this time.” Natasha gets up awkwardly to change the Blu-ray. She’s careful not to put much weight on her healing ankle, and sits with her bad leg stretched out in front of the TV to get the next movie set up.

As Peggy walks past her to get the popcorn, she puts a hand deliberately on Natasha’s shoulder, squeezes once, and says nothing.

_I’m glad to be here._

 

* * *

 

None of that goes into any report. Peggy’s lingering touches and Natasha’s lingering looks, they're not noticeable to anyone else and certainly not relevant to the way that they’ve become a two-woman assault team and infiltration unit. It’s not part of their professional lives, so as far as the reports are concerned, those things never happened.

It’s a secret thing between them, like the files in the box under Natasha’s bed. Secrets within secrets, boxes within boxes. Natasha loves that kind of stuff; it’s about the only way she can feel safe enough to actually _relax_ and _enjoy herself._

Plus, she really likes puzzling her way through the layers of someone else’s secrets. Peggy does too, in a more forthright, slamming-through-walls kind of way.

So it was really only a matter of time before they uncovered the truth about SHIELD.

 

 

 

 

 


	10. The Takedown

 

 

 

Their latest assignment is a two-man job: infil and sabotage. Fury gives it to them personally. “Just you two,” he says, with a touch of suspicion in his voice.

“He’s not sure who to trust,” Natasha translates later, once they’re en route, alone in the quinjet together.

“He’s never sure who to trust,” Peggy points out. She looks over her shoulder at Natasha. The light streaming in through the cockpit brings out the red in Peggy's hair, but makes her lips look darker than they are. That Damned Lipstick. And she can't even talk about how all that looks combined with the  _fucking stealth suit._ Christ.

At least she’s not doing victory rolls anymore. Though Natasha’s not certain this low-roll business is actually better. The errant curls are still maddening.

But it’s not the way it used to be: that hot spike of feeling she interprets as anger. It’s… softer now, which is _disgusting._

“Alright?” Peggy asks, a slight furrow between her brows.

“I’m always alright,” Natasha says.

The controls ping and Peggy reaches up to flip a switch. “Coming up on our infil point now.”

Natasha checks the charge on her gauntlets. They crackle pleasingly.

 

* * *

 

The remnants of AIM have given themselves a new paint job and a shitty rebrand. _Advanced Ideas in Destruction? Really? That’s what you’re going with?_

And who decided that _Illinois_ was the best place to hide their not-secret-enough development laboratory? For starters, a sudden influx of nerds and city boys to podunk nowhere in the middle of the Corn Belt tends to draw attention. Second of all, it’s very hard to hide a state of the art facility in one of the flattest states in the country. Anything taller than a barbed wire fence tends to stick out.

_“Widow, are you in position?”_

Natasha is hanging upside down with her pliers buried in the surveillance system. She brings her communicator to her mouth. “Three seconds,” she says quietly. She worms the pliers in a little deeper and tugs, just enough to pull the wire loose from its housing, as though from faulty work or plain old wear and tear. Bad luck, that’s all. “You’re clear,” she adds.

_“Copy. I’m on the move.”_

Natasha swings down from the ceiling to the rafter below and runs lightly along the beam, fast and silent. Her left earpiece, which is tapped into the comms channel for the security team, comes alive with a crackle and a sigh. “Tell maintenance we’ve got dead cameras in the northwest quadrant. Check the box. Security team, you’re on manual patrol until the system’s back up.”

Groans and acknowledgement answer the call. “Relocating from the southeast quadrant,” someone says.

“Hear that, Captain?” Natasha says into her wrist.

_“Copy.”_

Natasha smiles and drops from the rafters, landing with a quiet thump on the walkway. She runs, the route from here to the boiler room unspooling in her mind. The quote-unquote boiler room. For a “boiler room” it’s got an awful lot of security, and it draws enough electricity to power this building twelve times over.

See, the one and only thing that AID is actually really good at is greasing the right palms to make sure that they can skate by without interference as long as they don’t draw too much attention to themselves. The point here is to make sure that they _do_ draw too much attention to themselves.

 _“Charges set,”_ Carter says. _“Waiting for your signal.”_

At the boiler room, Natasha takes the digital lockpick off her belt. A moment later, she’s in, the door closing and locking behind her. The boiler room is a shadowy maze of pipes and industrial wiring. She moves fast and quiet along the walkway, hops the railing and drops to the next level, where there’s an unmarked door. Just where their intel said it would be. She puts the digital lockpick in place and brings her wrist to her mouth.

“I’ve reached objective two. Time to make some noise, Captain.”

The next thing she hears is a distant explosion.

_“SECURITY TO THE SOUTHWEST — NO, SOUTHEAST QUADRANT! NOW!”_

Natasha smiles, lets herself into the hidden lab, and abruptly comes up short.

Intel suggested that this lab was attempting to recreate Stark’s arc reactor. And they weren’t strictly speaking wrong. There _is_ an arc reactor there — or the Great Value version, at least. It’s not miniaturized, not by a long shot, taking up the whole central area of the lab. It glows a sinister green because of course it does, and pulses in a way that makes Natasha extremely anxious. It also gives her _ideas._

But the reactor isn't the experiment. It's there to power the rest of the lab. Which was _not_ in their intel. This isn't what they thought. And the first workstation Natasha stops at shows a diagram for what is pretty clearly a gun.

“Heads up, Cap, these guys might have advanced weaponry,” she adds.

“Right,” Carter replies in a strained voice. “That is. Confirm. Confirming that.” There’s a strange _fwhump fwhump_ sound in the background. “Widow, I’m going to need you to blow that place sky high.”

“I should get the hard drives,” Natasha says, already moving to do exactly that, shaking a collapsible backpack out from one of her belt pouches. “This isn’t what we thought, we should—”

“That’s a negative, Romanoff. These are _HYDRA_ guns!”

Natasha looks around at the workstations, the pieces of tech, the tell tale glowing power cells: green instead of blue, but unmistakably similar to the guns Natasha’s seen dissected in Peggy’s wartime files. “Well shit.”

Another FWHUMP, but louder this time — if it were a gunshot, Natasha would call that a direct hit. “Peggy?” Natasha calls. “Peggy?” she says again, in a half-panic, before remembering _fuck, call signs._

“Busy,” Peggy says through gritted teeth. “Blow the place and get out of there, I don’t know how much longer I can keep them occupied.”

“Give me as much time as you can!” Natasha gets to work.

 

* * *

 

“What the _bloody hell_ took you so long?” Peggy shouts when Natasha comes barreling across the grounds, weaving to avoid the green blasts coming from the guards that have finally caught up to her. Then Peggy notices the pack on Natasha’s back and her expression goes from angry to _detonation imminent_ which is timely, since—

“Fifteen seconds!” Natasha says when she’s close enough for Carter to hear her over the _fwhump fwhump_ of AID’s knockoff Tesseract guns.

Peggy grabs the front of Natasha’s vest and throws her bodily towards the treeline. Natasha rolls with it and a moment later Carter is landing in the dirt beside her, pulling her in close. They practiced this too.

Natasha wraps her arms tight around Carter and Carter jams the shield down in the dirt over their heads, her whole weight braced behind it, with Natasha curled tight and close against her — and the precious pack poking them both in their stomachs and chests.

For a breathless second, they wait—

And then the explosion deafens them. Natasha squeezes her eyes tight shut against the green light blazing. She knows what’s happening here: a beam of light shooting upwards, just like LA in 2008. Unmistakable despite the green tint. Stark’s lawyers will be all over AID by the end of the day. Interesting explosion. Very distinctive. What kind of facility was that exactly?

The light fades, and Peggy starts to pull away, but Natasha read the reports on what happened the _last_ time someone blew up a full-size arc reactor. She tightens her grip. “Wait,” she says.

The secondary blast is a good old-fashioned fireball and Natasha feels the shockwave from it hit the shield and go ringing through it, through Carter, and into her too.

The ringing lasts long into the buzzing, crackling silence that follows.

Natasha lets go. Carter pushes her back and grabs the bag. She throws it at Natasha, and Natasha has to fumble to catch it.

“Hope they’re as important as you think they are,” Peggy snaps, then holsters the shield on her back. The star is soot-smeared and the bottom rim is grubby with dirt. “Let’s go.” Natasha puts the backpack full of stolen hard drives on and clips the front strap over her armor.

 

Natasha holds her tongue until they’re back to the quinjet, and so does Carter, but when the Captain moves to take the pilot’s seat, Natasha intercepts her. “Let me,” she says, and engages stealth mode before she even starts the thing up. “I know a place.”

“Oh?” Carter says, with a weight of chilly disapproval.

“A safehouse,” Natasha clarifies. She reaches under the dashboard and manually disengages the route navigator, just to be sure that no one will be able to retrace their flight later. “Not one of SHIELD’s,” she adds, with a meaningful look up at Carter.

Carter narrows her eyes but doesn’t say anything.

 

The safehouse is one that Natasha commandeered in the blurry grey time after when she left her old keepers and before she crawled in from the cold and joined SHIELD at Clint’s urging. It's in the deep woods of Canada, a cabin belonging to a survivalist almost as feral as Natasha. He had been Red Room, once, like her. She had tracked him down and killed him for his hidey hole, the way animals might kill each other for a good den to hibernate in.

Natasha lands the quinjet in the clearing behind the cabin and leaves stealth mode engaged. She unstraps from the pilot’s seat and reaches for the bag of hard drives, but Carter’s already grabbed it.

They troop out of the quinjet and Natasha leaves Peggy on the porch while she circles the property, disengaging (some of) the booby traps she set when she put this place to bed almost a decade ago.

“Clear,” she reports, once she's done her sweep. She opens the door, ushering Carter inside. Natasha can see at a glance by the smooth layer of dust over everything that nothing’s been tampered with in the time she’s been gone.

Once the door is shut behind them, Carter tosses the bag onto the couch, sending up a cloud of dust, and turns on Natasha.

Natasha gives her a deeply unimpressed look. “At least let me explain myself before you come after me for _disobeying a direct order.”_ She pronounces _direct order_ with a sneer.

“Oh no,” Peggy says. “You don’t get to play insubordination with me. I don’t _care_ that I’m your captain, I care that we’re a _team._ Yes, you disobeyed an order, but what matters to _me_ is that you put both our lives at risk for intel that should’ve been destroyed.” She jabs a finger at the pack, now lying abandoned behind them. “Now, we have to take _that_ back to our superiors. You _know_ how long I’ve spent campaigning to get Phase 2 put on ice. This is going to reignite the whole—”

“You’re not thinking clearly about this,” Natasha states coldly. “This is too personal for you.”

“You’re damned right it’s personal!” Peggy’s voice rises to a shout. “I’ve been trying to do this one good thing—”

“But it’s not the _smart_ thing. You’re thinking like _Steve,”_ Natasha says, throwing the name like a punch.

Peggy takes a step closer, looming over Natasha, all cold fury and thin red lips. “Don’t you—”

“Where did they get HYDRA guns, Peggy?” Natasha says, undercutting the conversation, sliding the knife home before the fight can even get off the ground.

Peggy closes her mouth.

“Who do we _know_ had access to HYDRA guns and HYDRA schematics?”

Peggy’s brows come together and it’s like Natasha can _see_ her spy brain ticking into gear. “HYDRA collapsed a long time ago. It was wartime, all kinds of things got… scattered to the winds. AID could’ve... picked those up anywhere.” But she doesn't look so sure about that.

“Or they could’ve gotten them from SHIELD.”

The statement falls into the dusty silence between them like a grenade, still ticking.

“That’s why we’re here instead of at a SHIELD safehouse,” Peggy deduces.

“Now you’re getting it,” Natasha says. “It’s good that I have a long history of going off-radar when things get messy, and someone here—” she nods at Peggy “—can vouch for my whereabouts when we get back. Otherwise SHIELD might get suspicious. Now do you want to help me go through these hard drives or not?”

 

They go down to the basement of the safehouse. It’s more of a panic room, really. It’s one step down from a bomb shelter, with a spartan little bathroom, a small stash of food, a bare mattress, and some computer equipment that might as well be from the dark ages. There's an old, clunky laptop that had once been Natasha's, and an older, clunkier computer that had belonged to the original owner of the cabin.

She can’t remember his name. She can’t remember who he was to her. She can’t remember what she did with his body.

It only takes Natasha half an hour to cobble together something vaguely functional with scraps from her SHIELD gear and some programs she keeps downloaded on her phone. They divide the hard drives into two piles and start scrolling through.

Most of it is garbage, and garbled from trying to decrypt it with the wrong type of equipment. But there's enough to get started, to at least get an idea what they're working with. Mostly, it's lots of theories and theoretical applications that aren’t useful. They don't say anything about _where_ the theories came from. And then—

“Nat.” Peggy’s voice is sharp.

Natasha spins to where Peggy is hunched over the jerry-rigged laptop she’s working on. She looks up, expression grim. “Come look at this.”

Natasha scoots over to Peggy’s side of the bunker and looks over her shoulder. “What am I looking at?”

“Bloodwork,” Peggy says grimly. “Some of it’s mine. From the _forties.”_

Natasha nods. Her feelings are sending a very different kind of telegram right now, but she ignores it. She needs to be objective about this. “So that’s it, then. No way anyone got that by accident. SHIELD keeps that shit on lock.”

“That’s not all,” Peggy says. “This — Natasha, I’m pretty sure _this_ bloodwork is _yours.”_

That feels less like getting a telegram and more like getting a bucket of ice dumped over her. “Well that makes sense,” she says, putting on her best cool collected calm. “I told you they took enough blood to—”

“—start a bank, I remember. And yes... _some_ of these tests are from SHIELD,” Peggy starts.

“Some?” Natasha says sharply, leaning in close, putting two hands on the back of Peggy’s chair to peer at the screen.

Peggy scrolls down, opens a different file, a different dataset. “These are — there’s no date on these tests, Natasha, but they’re… they’re from before you joined SHIELD.” Peggy looks up at her, brown eyes full of concern. “They’re from when you were a child.”

Natasha snatches her hands off the chair and takes a step back.

“That’s not all,” Peggy says in a rush. “The blood type, the genetic profile, it’s a match, but the rest of this is…” She trails off, watching Natasha warily. She turns to face Natasha head on.

“What?” Natasha prompts. “The rest of this is _what?”_

Peggy takes a breath, and Natasha can almost hear the words coming, can almost feel the shape of them before she says:

“You _do_ have the serum, Natasha.”

Something in her already knows it, but even so…

Peggy is still talking, soft, like you talk to a wild animal. “Some version of it, at least. The Red Room must have... acquired some. They gave it to you when you were a child.”

The words go through Natasha like bullets, and like bullets, she doesn’t feel them at first. On the one hand, it makes sense — she's stronger than she should be, she heals fast, she… but on the other hand, it makes _no sense at all._ She shakes her head, a sharp rejection. “If SHIELD had — why would they keep that from me? What would be the point?”

Peggy’s on her feet now — when did that happen? _Pay Attention,_ says the nameless, faceless Red Room trainer—

Natasha shakes her head sharply. She pays attention. Peggy is facing her with a worried, wary expression on her face.

Natasha’s mouth keeps going, without her approval. “SHIELD has secrets, of course they have secrets, but there’s _no reason_ to keep something like _that_ from me — from my medical—” She sucks in a sharp breath.

Peggy nods slowly. Natasha’s the one playing catch up now. Peggy’s already reached the station where this train of thought ends.

“The arc reactor tech, that’s — that’s Stark Industries. The HYDRA guns, that’s SHIELD Archives, and Phase 2, that’s — that’s top secret. And Medical,” Natasha rattles off.

“That’s three or four separate departments. Three or four separate systems that don’t even talk to each other, thanks to Nick and his obsession with compartmentalizing,” Peggy says.

“This isn’t just a leak, or a mole, or even a massive data security breach,” Natasha says, getting her feet under her, getting traction with the idea.

“This is collaboration,” Peggy confirms. “With AID. With the Red Room.”

“With HYDRA,” Natasha finishes.

Peggy nods, her red lips pressed tight and grim.

The grenade that landed between them upstairs, when Natasha said _or they could’ve gotten them from SHIELD,_ finally goes off. The blast of white-hot rage that fills Natasha is — not an emotion she can contain. Not something she can hide. The collar of her uniform chokes her, and she starts tearing at the buckles, the straps. She’s trapped. _She’s trapped._

She thought she _knew._ She thought — a leak maybe. Or that SHIELD was just — just _outsourcing,_ just _using_ AID to develop tech they knew they shouldn’t be working on. Under the radar, out of sight.

But this is… this is something else. This is _the Red Room,_ just painted over black. She tears off her uniform top and throws it in the corner, so she’s just wearing her undershirt and tac pants. She pulls at the buckle on her belt, the red hourglass. It breaks off in her hands with a loud _snap._ She’s still _theirs,_ still telling _their fucking lies,_ still putting blood on her hands for _them._

“Natasha—”

Peggy’s big, elegant hands, the close cropped nails, reaching out, trying to soothe. Natasha bats them away. The white star on Peggy’s chest is in front of her. She snarls and tears at it. _All of it. LIES._

Peggy gets with the program at that point, starts pulling off her uniform too. For a moment it’s all tearing velcro and her own hard breathing and buckles snapping under the force of Peggy’s anger. Then Peggy throws aside her uniform top too. They’re both standing their in their undershirts — Natasha’s is black, and long-sleeved, Peggy’s white, and sleeveless.

“Better?” Peggy asks.

“Not really,” Natasha says.

Peggy can’t quite muster up a smile, but maybe it looks like she wants to. There’s a chain around her neck, Natasha notices, the end of it tucked under her shirt. The dogtags. Natasha reaches out and hooks a finger through the ball chain, tugs lightly until the tags appear. Peggy closes her fist around Steve’s name but doesn’t take them off. There’s a muscle flexing in her jaw.

“It’d be one thing if I died for nothing,” Peggy says. Her fist around the tags clenches hard. “But so did they.”

Natasha shakes her head. “Not for nothing. You’re here. We can fix it.”

“Fix it?” Peggy repeats, not even bothering to hide the bitterness in her voice. She shakes her head and looks away.

“Not that kind of fix,” Natasha says. She bares her teeth. “Don’t you know how Hercules beat the Hydra?” Her smile widens. “He _burned_ it.”

Peggy looks back at her, brown eyes sharp. “Hercules had help,” Peggy says. “It takes two, you know. One to cut off the heads—”

“—and one to scorch the stumps so they can’t grow back.” Natasha tips her chin up in challenge. “I've always liked fire.”

That’s when the game _really_ changes. Because that’s when Peggy Carter hooks one callused hand around the back of Natasha’s neck and kisses her, hard.

 

 

 

 

 


	11. Dirty Boxing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you don't want to read porn, skip down to the page break with "Much, much later." If you do want to read porn... _enjoy._

 

 

 

Peggy breaks the kiss and steps back. “Christ, I’m sorry,” she says. “Sorry, that was—” she’s  _ blushing, _ Natasha notes “—unprofessional,” she finishes, looking flustered. 

“A long time coming,” Natasha corrects, steps in close, and kisses her again.

One of them moans. Maybe both. Peggy pushes Natasha back against the wall, still kissing her. Natasha scrabbles for control, hooks her leg over Carter’s hip. The utility belt digs into her inner thigh, and then Peggy is grabbing her, pulling hard, lifting. The concrete wall of the safehouse scratches Natasha’s back through her thin undershirt and she hisses. 

But now Natasha’s got the high ground. She wraps her arms around Peggy’s dumb ham hock shoulders like it’s a chokehold, clamps her legs around Peggy’s waist for good measure. 

“Natash—” Peggy starts to say something — probably something  _ stupid _ — and Natasha puts a stop to that by getting her fingers into Carter’s ponytail and yanking. “Ah!”

     

Natasha gets her teeth into the line of Carter’s throat, like she’s wanted to for — a while. She's wanted to do that for a while, is all. Peggy tastes like salt, like canvas and plasticky kevlar where her uniform touches her skin. Natasha pulls back to admire her handiwork and frowns in momentary confusion at the waxy red smears that have appeared on the pale column of Carter’s throat.

“Oh my god,” Peggy says, eyes fixed on Natasha’s mouth. “You’re wearing my lipstick.”

Natasha grins, feral, and smears her mouth across Carter’s jaw, biting, leaving more and more smudges of red, red, red.

Carter staggers away from the wall, and Natasha clamps her legs tighter around Peggy’s middle even as the Captain’s broad hands curl and grip hard at her thighs. Natasha tugs her hair again, thinking giddily of horses, of all that power between her legs and the reins in her hands. Carter makes a very undignified grunt. But she also stumbles left as Natasha intended and goes down hard on the bare mattress next to the wall.

Straddling her now, Natasha grabs Peggy’s wrists and pins them back so Peggy’s arms are curved over her own head, muscles standing out whipcord strong. Peggy dips her chin and fixes her brown eyes on Natasha, challenging. 

Natasha stares her down, breathing hard and rocking her hips — just a little, just because she can’t help it. “We doing this?” she asks, breathless. “Are we doing this now?”

Peggy flexes against Natasha’s grip (she could push back stronger, probably, take the upper hand if she wanted — maybe?) and squirms under her. Pressing her legs together, Natasha realizes. Looking for relief. Her lashes flutter. “I can’t think of a single reason why not,” she says, staring up at Natasha with her dark eyes half-lidded and her red lips smeared and wrecked and slightly parted. “Can you?”

Natasha can think of a few reasons why not.  _ Unprofessional, _ says the Red Room trainer in her head.  _ Is this love, Agent Romanoff?  _ Loki’s slithering voice hisses.   _ She’s vulnerable,  _ says her own voice, like spider silk in her ears.  _ You could kill her like this, if you needed to. _

She ignores them.

She kisses Peggy again; it’s answer enough.

Things get a little blurry after that. Not in a gaussian-blur, old-time movie, fade-to-black way, blurred like the shield flying through the air. Blurred like the moment when the drugs start to take hold. 

One kiss smears into lots of kisses, into teeth set against her throat, a tongue searing and wet on her collarbone.  She lets go of Peggy’s wrists and rucks up the shirt, sliding her hands over Peggy’s sides. She’s soft there, and Natasha presses hard enough to feel the muscle underneath. Solid. Sturdy. Natasha grinds down and whines a little, and Peggy’s hands snap to her back, pulling her closer, fingertips digging in.  Then it’s all hot hands, grabbing hard enough to leave marks on her hips, her thighs.

Their breath is heavy and harsh in the cave-like space of the bunker under the cabin deep in the woods. Secure as a lockbox in a grave in the middle of nowhere. Boxes within boxes. Secrets within secrets within secrets, Natasha thinks. Hidden places. Dark places.  _ Safe _ places.

Peggy grabs Natasha’s waist and  _ moves her, _ just lifts her up and off and back an arm’s span and Natasha’s head spins with — it’s not rage. She knows that. She knows that  _ now.  _ But it’s definitely rage-adjacent. Peggy sits up, then kneels up, grabbing for the hem of Natasha's undershirt, eyes fixing on Natasha’s chest, which is — yeah, that’s fair. 

Natasha bats her hands away and pulls it off herself, reaches for the black sports bra next and squirms out of that too. Not particularly sexy maybe, but that doesn't really concern her just now. Sexy is something she does for work, and this — this isn't work. She throws the bra aside and looks back to Peggy.

They’re both kneeling on the mattress, facing each other. Peggy is still wearing her sports bra, and holding her tank top crumpled in the other hand. Her eyes are hungry on Natasha’s body. Natasha knows what she looks like. She’s not surprised.  But just  _ looking _ isn’t quite going to do it for her.

She grabs Peggy by — well by Steve’s dogtags, as it happens. She freezes. She glances up at Peggy's face and meets Peggy's eyes flickering up. They both check in with each other; a breath, a pause. 

“Okay?” Peggy asks, suddenly unsure. It’s an unfamiliar look on her face.

Natasha nods. “Yeah. It’s fine. We’re all widows here.”  

“Are we?” Peggy asks. Immediately, she looks like she wishes she could take the question back. But then she visibly decides to stick by her guns. “Are you?” she asks. “Is it more than a code name?”

There’s lipstick smeared across Peggy’s chin. Natasha gently swipes her thumb through it. She thinks of her fractured memories, and wonders how broken they really are. She thinks of Spartacus dancing in his chains, a body on a slab, blue eyes. She thinks of the partner she can’t quite remember. She sighs.

“How the hell would I know?” she points out.

Peggy’s face crumples in sympathy. She opens her mouth, but Natasha shakes her head. “Shut up,” she says. “Don’t talk.” She pulls Peggy in by the dogtags and kisses her again, then drops the tags and reaches down.

The Captain's belt rings out loud in the muffled stillness of the bunker.  Peggy cups the back of Natasha’s skull and kisses her, soft at first but then more demanding, opening her mouth, setting her teeth none-too gently into Natasha’s lower lip. Her hand slides down from Natasha’s neck, over her collarbones. Natasha grins against Peggy’s mouth as Peggy takes a double handful and makes a happy little sigh. Yep. Breasts are  _ great, _ and Peggy’s hands are big and warm and she knows  _ exactly _ how to touch, letting the callouses on her thumbs drag and catch in all the best ways.

Natasha hisses, throws her head back, arching into the touch shamelessly. Peggy laughs at her because  _ Peggy is terrible. _ In vengeance, Natasha and pushes her hand down the front of Peggy's pants, past the band of her underwear and lifts her head to see the exact expression on Peggy's face, when—

She’s soft here too, and warm, and the hair under Natasha’s palm is coarse. Peggy hums approvingly, slides her hands around Natasha’s ribcage and starts a lazy journey downwards. Too slow for Natasha’s taste. She leans in a little, presses her whole body against Peggy to get her hand that little bit further. Her longest finger meets the hot, slick center of her and Natasha thinks  _ there it is. _

Peggy throws her head back, fingers curling involuntarily against Natasha’s sides. She swears and scrambles to get her hand down Natasha’s pants too.

Natasha’s pants are significantly tighter, but neither button nor fly stands a chance against a supersoldier’s desperation.

“Fuck,” Natasha says devoutly when Peggy’s blunt fingers press against her, part her, press tantalizingly  _ almost in _ and then up, sliding easily — because  _ yes _ Natasha gets  _ very _ wet she knows it it’s a talent or whatever but  _ fuck— _

Both of them straining, the angle awkward, rocking into each other’s hands and trying to kiss all at the same time. It's frantic, and messy, and desperate, and brutally, ruthlessly honest. It is as far removed from the sleek Black Widow and the elegant Lady Liberty as Natasha and Peggy themselves are. 

Natasha bites Peggy’s jaw, pulls her head back sharply by the hair to get at her neck and leave marks in bruises rather than lipstick. Peggy grips Natasha’s hip hard with her free hand, controls her hungry rocking and slows it, keeps a steady pressure with her other hand, two fingers right where Natasha most wants them, steady circles that are slow, but building, building, building —

Natasha grits her teeth and  _ makes sure that  _ Peggy goes over the edge first. She presses her face into Peggy’s sweaty clavicle and cricks her wrist painfully to get the right angle , the back of her arm pressing hard against the inside of Peggy’s trousers as she slides her longest finger up and  _ in, _ all wet heat and clenching muscles. She watches and listens to Peggy’s sudden shocked inhale, stares directly down into Peggy’s cleavage and curls her finger, pressing in pulses and rubbing with the heel of her hand, awkwardly wiggling her thumb against Peggy’s clit. 

Peggy’s thighs clamp together and she swears again, loud and ragged and stuttering. She rides Natasha’s hand hard, in sharp little jerks. The twitching subsides to a shiver and she opens her eyes.

Natasha smirks. She always wins.

Peggy bites the smirk off her mouth. 

 

* * *

 

 

Much, much later, when they decide they’re done, they lie diagonally across the bare mattress and stare at the concrete ceiling of the bunker under the cabin. Natasha can’t feel much but tingling below her waist. She’s got her pants pulled back up because it’s chilly in here, now that the sweat they worked up is cooling. Peggy never got out of her sports bra, which is a tragedy. Natasha plans to remedy that oversight next time. That's one way to ensure that there will be a next time. Meanwhile, Natasha stole Peggy's tank top because her own undershirt was too much hassle. In a minute she’s gonna clean up and get her spare gear and... Sleep maybe? Maybe not. Her brain is just pleasantly cooked enough to make her thoughts spark and flow a little fast and loose.

“Operation Paperclip,” Natasha says.

“Huh?” Peggy says, sounding more than halfway asleep. 

“Operation Paperclip. Recruiting enemy scientists and bringing them to the US.”

“I read about that,” Peggy says slowly. 

“I bet if we dig, find the full list, we’ll find the roots of all this. If it's in deep enough to be in four separate departments — and some of SI — then it’s been here since the beginning.”

Peggy yawns hugely. “Are you always like this after a good orgasm?”

“Or two.” Natasha elbows Peggy. “Keep up, Carter.” 

Peggy rubs her face with her clean hand. Well. Clean-ish. “It's not actually as simple as just burning it to the ground. Nick sent us after AID — and he did it alone. Why would he do that if he was collaborating with them all along?”

“Maybe he was hoping to get us killed on the job, keep us out of the way.” Natasha doesn't look at Peggy while she says it. Nick vouched for her, along with Clint and Maria. She doesn't like to think that any of them might have been—

Peggy's hand finds hers and squeezes. “Or maybe the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing. We’ll need to figure out how deep it goes before we make a move. Play it smart. Figure out who gets arrested and who—”

“—gets taken out by an anonymous assassin?” Natasha says sweetly.

Peggy gives her a disapproving look. “Who gets offered a reduced sentence in exchange for ratting out their superiors.”

“You’re no fun.”

“And we need to know who to take it to, who we can trust. If they’re in SHIELD, they could be everywhere.”

“Cute that you think we can trust anyone.”

“We’ll have to trust someone eventually, if we want to make this public.”

“Not in the age of the internet, we don’t.”

Peggy props herself up on her elbows to look at Natasha. Natasha bats her eyelashes, smiles sweetly. 

“What, just… dump it on the web?” Peggy says. 

“Once we’ve got our case built, our evidence all lined up. Why take it to the cops when cops can be dirty? Why take it to a reporter when they’re just gonna edit it? Cut out the middleman. Go straight to the people.”

Peggy smiles. Her lipstick is almost completely gone now, rubbed away with kisses. Her smile widens, shows teeth.

Natasha puts her hands behind her head. Her hair is a disaster. So is Peggy’s. “What do you say, Carter? You and me against… what, the forces of evil? Half the government? Maybe more? I like our odds.”

Peggy rolls on top of Natasha, slides her leg between Natasha’s legs and kisses her mouth, slow and sweet. Natasha allows it. There’s a feeling in her chest, growing, spreading under her ribs. Whatever cats feel when they purr, Natasha imagines it’s like this.

Peggy pulls back. Smiles down at her. “We can take ‘em.”

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **ROLL CREDITS**
> 
> That's the end of this story, but because of who I am as a person, I'm not done writing about these two. I've got a prequel in the works that's already about 20K of soup and mess, and an outline for a sequel. If you want an INKLING of where I'm going with this, hit Next Chapter (once it's posted later this morning) and you'll see the end credits teaser ;)


	12. End Credits Scene: Round Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a teaser for what's to come... eventually.

 

 

 

When they come out of the bunker, there’s someone waiting at the kitchen table. Natasha has pistols in both hands and Peggy is crouched in front of her with the shield raised before either of them register who it is.

When the face finally registers, Natasha feels her fingertips go numb. She doesn’t let her hands shake.

“Maria?” Peggy says, shield still held at the ready.

The woman sitting at their kitchen table lifts both empty palms and gives them a sheepish smile. _Maria’s_ smile. “Yeah,” she says. “Hi.”

“You know,” Peggy says conversationally. “Coming back from the dead is kind of _my_ thing.”

“Yeah,” Natasha agrees. “It’s like she stole your gimmick.”

“Downright rude,” Peggy adds.

“Just… hear me out,” Maria — or whoever this is — says.

“Why should we listen to anything you have to say?” Natasha challenges, voice coming out about three degrees sharper and meaner than she intended. Behind the shield, Peggy’s hand snakes back and grips Natasha’s waist; a comforting pressure. Natasha doesn’t uncoil, but she feels less like she’s about to fly apart at the seams.

The Maria lookalike licks her lips. She has to know that her next words will determine whether she lives or dies.

“What do you two know about the Winter Soldier?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can find me on [tumblr](https://girlbookwrm.tumblr.com/) if you want to yell at me about this end credits scene or ask how drafting is progressing -- I'm one of those rare author birds who doesn't mind (polite) asks about that kind of thing ;)

**Author's Note:**

> Indulge me a little and let me tell you the Story of Buff Peggy Fic. 
> 
> Just over a year ago I saw [this post](https://girlbookwrm.tumblr.com/post/172663288192/mamalaz-peggy-carter-as-captain-america-au) on tumblr and fell down a rabbit hole, like... really hard. I had this image in my head of a universe where Peggy gets the serum instead of Steve, and what that would mean, what that would look like. And then I read the Peggy!Cap comic, Exiles #3, and I was so enchanted and SO ROYALLY PISSED OFF BY THE WAY IT ENDED that I knew I needed to do a Peggy!Cap fic.
> 
> By September I had bits and pieces of an alternate TFA where Peggy gets the serum instead of Steve, but I stalled out on it, because in my head, that lead to Peggy in the future where she would meet _Natasha_ and _then..._ Well, it felt like if I started the story with Steggy and then ended with PeggyNat, that would be pulling the rug out from under the readers and dumping them unceremoniously into rarepair hell. I wasn't sure how to tell the Peggy!Cap story I wanted to tell, so I put the project on ice (ha ha ha)
> 
> And then [verbalatte](https://archiveofourown.org/users/verbalatte/pseuds/verbalatte) talked me into signing up for the RBB and I saw [esaael's](https://archiveofourown.org/users/esaael/pseuds/esaael) art of peggy and nat sparring and I Fell In Love. I mean it's gorgeous art of two women who never meet in the canon BUT SHOULD, so I very much wanted to write the story. I knew it COULD also solve my problem of where to start with the Buff Peggy fic. So I put it on my list, right at the top, crossed my fingers, and tried not to get my hopes up. I didn't know whether esaael would be interested in my Buff Peggy concept. But whether she was or not, I was I hyped and ready to write a peggynat story, _any_ peggynat story.
> 
> I got the art, and esaael liked my concept and has been super supportive. So I scrapped everything I had on the story and started afresh. Instead of beginning with Peggy getting the serum, we begin with Natasha and Peggy meeting for the first time on the helicarrier. esaael has been an ABSOLUTE JOY and SO HELPFUL and INSANELY NICE about my crazy ideas. grace and taja and the Gal Pal have been Heroes when it comes to betaing and editing. 30,000+ words later, here we are, The Buff Peggy Fic. Not what I thought it would be a year ago; so, so, so much better.


End file.
